Cisco should buy Plaxo as another layer to its unified communications strategy, reckons Web and social media commentator LaSandra Brill, writing in her Marketing in a Web 2.0 World blog.
She blogs: "Plaxo is now aggregating your social networking profiles with a pretty impressive list of supported sites. Imagine if these two efforts were combined. You could send someone a message and it will be delivered to them in the best possible way based on where they are and what they are doing."
I remember that when Plaxo crept onto the market a few years ago, not many of our columnists at Network World were too impressed. Linda Musthaler warned about the privacy issues that surrounded social networking software, including Plaxo (see here and here).
Some observers say social networking sites are now considered useful tools for self-promoting business types and employers are thought to be using such sites to check on prospective employees. But with the publicity surrounding this week's story about Facebook having to beef up its policing of pornography, harassment and inappropriate behavior on its site, which self-respecting business professional would want to associate themselves with such networks?
Are these tool useful to you or are you still spooked by the privacy issues?
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Just call me an old cynic
I am not so naive as to believe that there is any privacy left when it comes to the Internet. Like it or not, information about us is in hundreds of databases and other repositories. I grudgingly accept that the Department of Motor Vehicles stores my name, address and driver’s license; that the Harris County Appraisal District makes public my home address along with the value of my house and the amount I pay in property taxes; that my insurance company knows every intimate detail of my health history; that Kroger knows what kinds of groceries I buy, and how often. All of this information and much more is “out there” and I have no control over it. Given the number of security breaches we see daily, I can’t expect this data to be kept secure forever, but I accept that as a risk of doing business or of owning a home or having insurance.
However, I do draw the line at social networking sites that encourage me to provide very personal information that is no longer in my control as soon as I hit “enter.” Call me an old-fashioned cynic, but I am not a user of social networking sites like Plaxo, LinkedIn, MySpace and FaceBook. I believe that people have enough ways to reach me without me having to set up profiles in all these other places.
Millions of people, however, do find value in these sites. Good for them. I hope they have their eyes wide open when it comes to ways that their personal information can be used and are not outraged when it is abused. I can’t help but believe that, someday, there will be a case of massive exploitation of the millions of profiles on some social networking site. So, to answer the question posed in the original post, I am clearly in the camp of “spooked by privacy issues.”
The post suggests Cisco should buy Plaxo so that messages sent to a person can find that person through his preferred social network. OK, this might be fun for teenagers whose friends hang out on MySpace and FaceBook. But I don’t see the business value in the premise. Would I really want a client to send me a message on a MySpace account instead of my corporate email? No. While my company is small and I set the data policies, I’m pretty sure that a large company would have a policy against any business communications taking place on an uncontrolled application like MySpace. Such an action would just toss SOX, HIPAA, PCI and FRCP Rule 37(f) right out the window. If this activity were made possible, corporate compliance officers would have no choice but to block it for employees, anyhow.
Social networks are all the rage, and many companies are trying to figure out how to bring the benefits of the technology into the corporation. I’m excited to see this. But to use the unbridled applications that are in the public domain is just too scary a prospect for an old cynic like me.
Linda Musthaler
Principal Analyst, Essential Solutions
The old cynic...
No one puts major personal of information on social netwroking sites such as Social Security. No matter what the world is changing to a fully electronic society. There will forever be a risk. The government stores all you info electronically. There is nothing you can do about this. You cant gear this directly at Social Networking sites.