I never signed up for the service that I know of.
I have searched my emails for a confirmation message that you get when you do sign up for something like Twitter or Facebook.
Nothing.
But somehow I am a member.
And today I got an email from a distant acquaintance that is “accepting” my request to connect with him on Plaxo.
I never made that request.

I spent an hour on their Web site looking for a way to turn this off and all I found was a bland high-sounding privacy policy.

I have searched the blogs and all I see are people complaining about Plaxo and what looks to me like paid shills in the comments who are saying “What are you whining about? Others are just as bad.”

Well actually no, the others are not just as bad. Plaxo takes sneaky and evil to another level. Now they are part of Comcast and I cringe when I think what will next appear in my inbox.

If you wanted to be REALLY nice, you could even provide a link to the original post that encourages commenting (eg, View the original post to comment >>).

It makes me wonder if Pulse isn’t more about Plaxo than it is about giving control to the end user. And anyone out there correct me if I’m missing something, but I think Web2.0 is about giving control to the end user…

Imagine poor Shakespeare’s feelings if his “blog” and his work was plagiarized all over the place.

Keep fighting, David. If anyone can fix it, you can!!!

If Pulse ever starts display user’s content publicly without asking the user, then there might be a larger problem =)

Sure, I could disassociate myself from my blog on Pulse. Better yet, I could drop out of Pulse altogether. I’ve used Plaxo since prehistoric times, and think it’s a great service, and yeah yeah I know my list of contacts is really my “social graph” in disguise and so Plaxo can turn into a SNS inundating everyone with information about what everyone else is doing like my friend bought a pair of socks somewhere or my colleague bookmarked some page on delicious, and become one of the COOL Web companies. Sorry, if I wanted to waste my time doing that sort of stuff I would have set up a Facebook account.

Oh no, actually I did. Then recently I had my first encounter with the feared Beacon monster. I had downloaded Joost–you know, the online TV channel/viewer thing, which I never watch–and they spammed me with some mail about some recent shows and out of boredom I half-accidentally clicked on a music video by some artist named Rihanna who rarely seems to be fully clad and then lo and behold, the next time I logged into FaceBook it was ready to inform all my friends about my surreptitious viewing of the writhing singer. I *think* I was able to stop it from doing that, and now I *think* I’ve turned off all such foolishness, but it’s scary enough that I considered cancellingf my Facebook account entirely because it’s just so USELESS and INCESTUOUS reading about some guy who posted on some other guy’s wall or installed the latest stupid application.

If Plaxo wants to leverage its based of customers and contact info, which is great, it should figure out something more intelligent than shooting firehoses of low-density information around and it certainly shouldn’t start rogue comment threads. Why not try something around degrees of separation?

Here’s the situation as I see it: plaxo users choose to share their blog (and other types of information like photos, articles, etc.) inside pulse, sometimes publicly, sometimes only with a select group of contacts (e.g. family, friends, or business network). We make it easy for other plaxo users to leave non-anonymous comments with each item they can see in pulse, which creates a very high signal-to-noise ratio, because you know everyone in the discussion.

Now for privately shared items, we can’t just publicly re-post their comments to a public blog, because the user chose to share it only with some people. But for people who share their blog publicly within pulse (which is not uncommon, esp. for digerati who are used to sharing their thoughts for a public audience), it’s definitely not desirable to have two separate comment threads, one on the blog and one inside plaxo. I think ideally comments could get syndicated in both ways–plaxo users could see what comments were posted to the blog, and comments made inside pulse would find their way back to the blog as well. That way there would just be a single conversation.

So the question is: assuming you agree with this use case, technically speaking what is the best way to accomplish it? For getting blog comments *into* pulse, I guess if the blog has a comments RSS feed that’s discoverable, and we can associate comments with the blog post they’re from, that shouldn’t be too hard. But for getting pulse comments back onto the blog, I’m not sure what the best solution is. Given the prevalence of comment-spam, most blogs don’t make it easy to post comments in an automated way. I could imagine building plugins for wordpress and movabletype and so on, but I’d prefer a more open solution. Any ideas? Thanks! js

If I were him, I’d change my name to David Gotland, and then go buy some land, and then stand on that land and scream for days about how your name is Gotland, and yeah, you do.

You should try posting on something your own size David Hotland. That’s right. That land you bought is hot. Why you ask? Because I just set it on fire, bitch!

Basically, if you don’t link your blog to Plaxo, they have no way of knowing anything about your swimming pyromaniacs blog article. But if you do link your blog, as Bob has done, then you agree to have this content aggregated into your pulse stream. Other people are simply commenting on any individual items within your blog stream.