Hmmm... Plaxo's Pulse lets me see people's 'stream' without them agreeing to me being a connection!
August 31, 2007
In experimenting with Plaxo's Pulse in the past few days, I noticed one disturbing little thing. In signing up, I let it import my Gmail address book and when it informed me of who among my contacts also were Pulse users, I agreed to send them requests to connect. Two of those people were Chris Brogan and Alec Saunders, both of whom I know from various contexts. So I wasn't terribly surprised when I started seeing their updates in my "Pulse Stream":
However, there's a wee little problem with this. You see, when I click on their names, I get this:
and this:
Do you see the problem here? I see all their stream items (presumably for their "Business Network" feed) - but THEY HAVEN'T APPROVED MY CONNECTION REQUEST YET!
Oops.
There's a security/privacy issue here in that basically I can go and, it would seem, make a connection request to any other Pulse user. I won't see the user's contact information yet, but I will see their stream items in my Pulse Stream. It would seem to me that you would not want the user's stream items to appear in my stream until the user has actually approved the connection between us. Right?
I realize that the Plaxo Pulse service is still in beta and so presumably this will be fixed. If not, I'd love to hear someone explain why this is desired behavior.
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