Simplicity – Why I Deleted My Plaxo Account
How many social networks are you a member of? Personally, I’m on way too many to count.
Do we really need them all? Probably not.
Here’s a quick simplicity challenge for you: pick one social networking site and delete your account.
I just deleted my Plaxo account (here’s how to delete yours). I chose to delete Plaxo because:
1. I rarely logged in. In fact, I only logged in to accept someone’s connection request.
2. I got fed up with all the connection request emails and emails telling me that the requests were about to expire.
3. The site just wasn’t useful to me. It was adding noise to my life without providing value.
Now you may wonder why I didn’t just disable the emails from Plaxo and let my account sit idle. If I did that, people would still find me on Plaxo and try to connect. I don’t want them to think that I’m ignoring them. And my Plaxo profile would soon become out-of-date. What’s the point in having a stale social networking profile?
There you have it. Simplify your life a little by deleting an account.
Which account are you going to delete?
Photo by gorillaradio
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8 Responses to “Simplicity – Why I Deleted My Plaxo Account”
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About Andrew Flusche
Lawyer, bicyclist, husband.
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August 8th, 2009
Interesting Andrew. I like Plaxo, for it’s ability to synch your address book with your desktop client, and if you move, I get your update. Still, I respect your decision…and I just removed myself from Plurk. I’ll be doing more as time goes by, as like you, I only want to connect where I can add value, not just be another number.
Good post!
August 8th, 2009
@Phil – Thanks for your thoughts here. Maybe I wasn’t using Plaxo to its fullest capabilities. I knew it could sync things up, but I didn’t explore that very thoroughly.
August 8th, 2009
Andrew,
I head up marketing at Plaxo and appreciated your thoughtful post.
That said, I would like to counter one of the points you raise…
1) If you didn’t log in, your profile would be stale.
Quite the contrary, we have stressed dynamic profiles through interoperability with the whole of the web. You can hook up feeds from places where you actively participate and share, and flow content automatically into your Plaxo profile (with control of who sees which feed). Examples: Facebook, Flicker, Twitter.
Deleting your Plaxo account (and Plaxo public profile) gives you strictly less control over your personal brand and online identity. A well filled-out Plaxo public profile is great way to improve your personal SEO.
John
August 9th, 2009
@John
I appreciate you stopping by. I know that I can feed other site activity into Plaxo, but wouldn’t my contact information and other profile details become stale? Contact details seem to be the most important part of Plaxo. If those aren’t accurate, there’s not much point to having a profile.
You are absolutely right about SEO. For some people, that may be a reason to maintain accounts at as many sites as possible. Fortunately, it’s not an issue for me. My own sites are #1 and #2 for my name, with every other top 10 result being a social network profile or a post about me. I’m about as findable as one can be online.
August 9th, 2009
Ah, I should have Googled you first. You do, indeed, have great SEO already! 🙂
Re: your contact info. Keeping that up-to-date is not very much work, though.
All the best.
August 13th, 2009
Absolutly agree with Andrew on this one. I have deleted all my accounts on social networking site apart from one and I don’t feel I am missing out on anything.
X Chelsea
August 17th, 2009
one social networking is enough, keep me busy.
August 24th, 2009
I don’t really have toom many accounts as you said, I have linkedin, facebook and twitter only ..
Facebook is for personal use, I have my friends and so, it’s quite nice .. Twitter is for marketing and publishing my articles (I have too many followers)
But, i don’t really use linkedin ! I’ll delete my account !!!