Plaxo has a very open blogging policy. In fact, the company invented the very concept of blogging policies. I hope you can understand that accidents do happen. I’m sure if you met Rikk in person you’d think he’s a pretty swell guy you wouldn’t mind kicking a few back with. Sometimes an open policy can have as a consequence an unintended argumentative exchange like this one. That’s the nature of this medium being both immediate and lacking honest visual cues like this one: of which, Rikk’s self-deprecating humor could have used a few thousand of (IMO).

But if this is the price Plaxo pays for blogging transparency, I’d rather have the transparency. Wouldn’t you?

Take care,

terry

P.S. I used to work at Plaxo and, for what it’s worth, Rikk didn’t very much care for me at the end of it. But I know he didn’t intend to come off as “retaliating” and I hope you understand that he does look out for you, the customer (or not customer in this case), and means well. He just sometimes forgets that he is Executive Vice President of Engineering at Plaxo and that can sound pretty retalitory if someone with a title like that calls you out on what was a humorous comment, if a little not funny because it skirts the raw area of the truth of Web 2.0 a bit too closely. (If you call out Plaxo on spam, why not LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, etc.?)

Neither he nor Plaxo intended to “trick millions of people into sending out millions of email” even though that certainly did happen, and when it happenned, it took a very long time for us to admit it was a wrong.

I was one of the very last to admit that. For that, I apologize.