Thanks to alert cow-orker Tom Meunier, we see that my earlier prediction about Plaxo has indeed come true, sort of.
What I was really talking about at the time was the risk that Plaxo would decide that their business model made it attractive to share your contact data with third parties, possibly without your permission or knowledge. That’s why a number of large companies have banned their users from using services like LinkedIn and Plaxo. This PR looks like the first step down that road: it appears that they’re opening their data store to the fine folks who brought us Skweezer. That means that now your Plaxo data is only as secure as Plaxo or GreenLightWireless or your wireless device vendor can make it… not exactly a reassuring prospect.
Paul's Down-Home Page 
A review of our new community page
A review of our new community page
Jigsaw and Steve W. Martin: spammers
(I’m purposefully not linking to his web site or the book’s page on Amazon, so as not to give him any juice)…. Jigsaw bills itself as a sales lead database, and (to their credit) their TOS prohibits spamming– but I’m still not thrilled with the…
Paul,
I believe you may be reading too much in our press release. We’ve announced our Plaxo API that will allow the benefits of Plaxo to be extended into other types of devices, services, and products. Members will continue to have complete control over their own information and only be able to access their own information.
In the case of Skweezer, Skweezer users who are also Plaxo members will be able to access their Plaxo information from their wireless phones using Skweezer.
The announcement of our Plaxo API is a step towards the vision of providing Plaxo members the infrastructure for managing a single address book and contact database.
Through Plaxo and our API partners, people will be able to syncronize their address book, calendar, tasks and notes across their phone, PDAs, multiple mail accounts, and favorite applications removing the problem of maintaining multiple copies of the same information. The Plaxo API can be the basis for Plaxo integration with web services, Mac OS integration, Thunderbird, etc… As more and more partners join with Plaxo and leverage the Plaxo API, we move closer to realizing this vision.
I hope this helps,
Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com
Privacy might be good excuse for big corporations to ban the use, but the real reason is that they don’t want their talent to be exposed to head-hunters and greener fields other side of the fence.
Juhani
A Finn in San Francisco, CA