Plaxo Prepares To Launch Pulse Social Network – Will Users Trust It? Michael Arrington’s post title neatly captures the big question of the moment for those who… for those of us who compulsively sign up for web services. Another question is: does anyone besides us care?
The Pulse proposition seems to be: like Facebook, only open. There are two main problems with this. First, many of the millions of Facebook users don’t know why they should care about openness. Second, those who do care about and value openness also tend to care about and detest spam, and Plaxo has a convinction for spamming on its record.
Despite Plaxo’s past, I just went to its site to sign up. I was glad to see that I could sign up with my OpenID. Then I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t: “Unable to verify the specified OpenID” was the message I got.
I then signed up without my OpenID, intending to attach it later. Plaxo wanted rather more information from me than I’d like, but I went ahead. Then I tried to attach my OpenID. I was then prompted for the very information I’d just sighed about having to give.
I think I’ve had enough Plaxo for one day. I may return next week, if I hear glowing reports.
Andrew-sorry to here you had problems using your OpenID. Would you mind telling me what OpenID you tried to use, so I can look in our logs and see what went wrong? We just shipped this recently and it seems like various OpenID providers aren’t working as smoothly as others…Thanks! js
Uh…that’s “sorry to hear” of couse (yeesh!) 🙂