ambient

Scoble writes about his experiences with a preview version of Plaxo’s Pulse application - apparently something the application did triggered Facebook’s TOS and got his account disabled.

Out of curiosity, I created an account on Plaxo to see if the application was interesting. I like the idea but it immediately made me uncomfortable. It wants me to sign in to all of the various social networks I use so it can import my friend’s email addresses and create my own “stream.”

Streams are good; I like them. But why do I have to alert all of my friends that I have just given yet another application permission to spam all of them?

Meta-aggregators are a good thing too (disclosure: I’m building one, of sorts) but they should be polite and not ask users to annoy their friends in order to use it. I understand viral marketing, and there is even a place to add this sort of functionality, but do it later, after I’ve settled in and gotten comfortable.

Don’t make it the first thing I see.