Plaxo Pulse was released today as the latest contender for business attention in the social networking market. I’ve had a play with it and while it is ‘ok’ it’s very much an early version with limited capability and no applications to speak of. It does have a major advantage over Facebook in that I can get to my data – critically important from a business perspective and from that standpoint alone, it is worthy of consideration. But…my views are well summed up by Valleywag:
The company’s software already actively updates address books, but that’s about as exciting a business as LinkedIn. The new Plaxo aims to be the Web’s social butterfly. But before it emerges from the chrysalis, let’s all stop and ask ourselves: Can we face the propspect of having another social network to update without going mad? At some point the old and familiar outdraws the shiny and new.
So why would I be interested in Dandelife? From a business perspective, it is not quite as limited as Plaxo and has a useful, if different take. Marshall Kirkpatrick over at TechCrunch talked about it last month:
Stories are told in text and set wherever the author wishes on a time line. Photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube, either yours or other public items, can be added by drag and drop. There’s tags, there’s feeds – it’s totally hip.
True social networking is under development, but biographical time lines will soon be able to link to each other through functions like “this reminds me of†new post creation and a distinct tag class for peoples’ names. Stories can be marked as favorites, most popular items appearing in larger text on each user’s time line. Breadcrumbs put each story in context.
I like this idea, in part because I can keep as much or as little data private and only make it available to people I wish to include in my network. I could for example use it to share experiences around the current foot and mouth crisis among farmers in my network. Or, as an addition to the things Luis Suarez recently said about the impact of the extensive fires in Gran Canaria and Tenerfie last week. (Didn’t know about those? Courtesy of Luis, you can get the full rundown.) What I can’t do right now is create groups which would be very useful. this is something I can do in Plaxo.
Incidentally, I got turned on to Dandelife by Craig Cmehil through Twitter. I know it is sad but hey, I do the experimenting so you don’t have to 
The bigger question is how many of these services are going to survive my time starved attention? I suspect none bar one or two. The market is starting to get overloaded with social networks yet I’ve still to see a service that addresses business need in a way that is sufficiently attractive for me to say ‘yep that’s the one I want to focus my attention upon.’
I’ve said it before but it is worth repeating: The business market is huge; much larger than consumer yet consumer gets all the attention. When someone figures out how to meld consumer to business need, then I believe we’ll see something truly exciting.
Technorati Tags: plaxo pulse, dandelife
