Every widget that we’ve looked at so far on Sexy Widget has targeted primarily consumers as distributors. As a change of pace, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a widget whose primary value is to the enterprise.
The enterprise widget is hardly a new concept – ad networks and analytics companies have been using the widget format for years to distribute their software to enterprise web sites. In fact, Google AdSense may be the most successful widget of all time if you include revenue and profit impact as criteria.
The Plaxo Address Book Widget is a nifty, JavaScript based widget that allows sites to give their users the ability to access their address book directly from the page(s) of the host site. The easiest way to think about this functionality is in terms of the “invite a friend” tool that is so prevalent on social networks and community sites. Plaxo enables “invite a friend,” but in bulk.
While these sorts of tools are not that complicated for a site owner to build for any given email aggregator format (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.), Plaxo has built a single tool that provides this functionality for AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, Outlook / Outlook Express, and Plaxo. This tool is free.
It’s a good idea, and as somebody whose site depends almost entirely on viral marketing, I can appreciate the value of the product, as well as the pitch. Why should we spend development dollars building this functionality on our own, when Plaxo offers it for free?
Unfortunately, things that seem too good to be true often are.
As a site owner, I was OK with putting the Plaxo brand in front of my users as a standard email aggregator option. This would no doubt result in some new Plaxo accounts, as my site’s users became exposed to the brand. This seemed to me like a fair price to pay for using this tool.
However, the catch goes deeper than that. While testing the Plaxo Address Book widget, I tried uploading an Outlook Express CSV file. Before I could do this, my computer warned me that I was launching a download of Plaxo. I don’t use Plaxo, and I certainly wasn’t looking for a Plaxo download as I tried to forward a Web page to some contacts.
I don’t know enough about how this widget was built to understand if the Plaxo software is the key enabling factor that would allow me to upload my Outlook CSV file. But I do know that Plaxo has a history of very aggressive, bordering on intrusive marketing practices, and that I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting (and implicitly endorsing) a tool to my site’s users that forced a Plaxo download on them.
So my feelings about the Plaxo Address Book widget can be summarized as follows – it’s a neat idea, elegantly executed. But a forced download for my users is too high a price.
Hat tip: widgetoko.
Just to clarify-the "download" you're referring to is an ActiveX control that lets you auto-import your Outlook contacts (no need to export and import a CSV). But if you don't want to download any software (or if you're using a browser like Firefox that doesn't support ActiveX), you can just click on "Other" and manually import an outlook CSV (no download required).
Thanks for your interest in the widget! js
Posted by: Joseph Smarr | January 11, 2007 at 09:19 PM
Thanks for the info Joseph. Yes, it was exactly at the moment when I was trying to download the ActiveX control that I was told that I was about to download Plaxo. Whether or not it was deceptive (which it sounds like it wasn't), it seemed deceptive. You may want to clarify to the user exactly why they are downloading Plaxo when they try to download this ActiveX control.
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