According to Caroline McCarthy at the CNET blog, the growth is attributed to the announcement of OpenSocial. Admitedly, this is Plaxo’s data, not her conlusion. Her blog post is worth reading. (Dear Caroline, don’t worry about my readers getting the wrong message here, the truth is, no one reads this blog ;)).
However, I have an alternative reason for Plaxo’s growth. It’s because they decided to open the spam machines out again. I swear, this seems to be the same time frame that I received about a gazillion plaxo invites. Like this one:
Just for the record, I like what Plaxo can do, and think it’s tre-cool. But just when they were getting over the brand and perception that they were a lean, mean, spamming machine, they opened it up again and became the topic of (negative) discussion. Oops.
“tre-cool”??
Dude, you are the lexiconoclastic GURU! Thanks for the little nuggests of juicy new words. You’re the man.
Oh, and yeah, right after Open Social I was getting SPAMMED like crazy too. One of the spammers was YOU (or someone pretending to BE you) which is very interesting given that you would now write a post like this.
Hmmm.
Jason,
Thanks for your interest in the story behind the story. The reality is that the Pulse “social graph” grows the same way any other social network does, through a combination of people hearing about the service, checking it out, recommending it to others, asking people they know to connect with them. If you consider “friend” requests on Facebook to be spam, or “connection” requests on LinkedIn to be spam, I think the majority would disagree. It is the nature of social networking. The Google OpenSocial announcement got a wave of people re-evaluating Plaxo and Pulse, which kicked off a sustained wave of connection activity.
Spam is the stuff that isn’t sent on purpose. A friend request or a connection request is sent on purpose. Thus, all the Plaxo spam was spam because the people supposedly sending them weren’t doing it on purpose. Y’all can debate the lovely graph all night if you like, but Plaxo was still spam when it did that.