One of the coolest aspects of Plaxo is that your address book is self-updating. When Plaxo members in your address book change their contact information, it also gets automatically updated in your address book. Vice versa, when you change your contact info on Plaxo, people who have you in their address book can get your latest info. The importance and value of this feature is increasing rapidly as the Plaxo network continues to grow and the percentage of Plaxo members in your address book continues to rise.
Today we are enhancing this core feature by giving Plaxo members greater control over how they notify others and receive notification of such changes.
Receiving Member-to-Member Notifications
New choices, now available from your communication preferences, include:
- Daily or weekly digest. Instead of getting individual member-to-member e-mail notifications each time someone changes their contact info, you can choose to get a single weekly message.
- Silent update. You have the option to suppress member-to-member notification e-mails globally, or for specific individuals in your address book.
Communicating Your Own Changes
When you’re updating your own contact information online you also have a new “silent mode” option, which still automatically updates Plaxo members who have permission to see your contact info, but withholds sending them an e-mail notification. This option is particularly useful when making small changes to your contact info.
As always, you continue to have control over who gets your home or work contact info via your sharing options .
We hope these changes improve the Plaxo experience even more and as always, we want to hear what you think.
--Dassi Shusterman, Plaxo Product Manager
In our continuing series on the new Plaxo Alerts. In the previous article, I talked about the Member Status box. For this article, I wanted to bring attention to the new "From:" portion of Plaxo Alerts.
As members may know, a Plaxo Alert is generated and inserted into the Plaxo member's email Inbox each time the member's address book is updated by Plaxo. An update can occur whenever a member's contact responds to an Update Request or if a member's contact updates their own Plaxo card (assuming the contact is also a Plaxo member). Plaxo updates the Plaxo member's address book automatically and creates a Plaxo Alert to notify the member of what information has been changed.
In the past, some members expressed confusion over who and how the Alert was generated. We wanted to make sure we properly addressed these concerns with the new Plaxo Alerts. The From: header of the Alert now looks something like: From: Joe User via Plaxo
where "Joe User" is the name of the contact whose information was updated via Plaxo.
Since the alert was generated on behalf of the contact (ie: "Joe User") based on his update action, we wanted to make sure to include the contact's name in the From: header. But we also added "via Plaxo
But member's also told us they loved the ability to REPLY TO the contact as a result of the Plaxo Alert. For example, if you received an alert notifying you that "Joe User has a new job!", you might wish to send Joe a congratulation email on his new position. Fortunately, members are still able to accomplish this with the new Plaxo Alerts. The Reply-To: header is set to the return email address of the contact allowing the member to simply click "Reply To" within their email client and send their response.
In our continuing series on the new Plaxo Alerts. In the previous article, I talked about how the alert color helps to identify the type of alert you have received.
We tried to design the Plaxo Alerts to be aesthetically appealing and crisp, while presenting the important details.
The new alerts also show a Member Status box located in the upper right corner of each alert. Here you can review your current Plaxo Membership level (are you a VIP Member?), as well as see how long you've been a Plaxo member (e.g. Member Since: 01/01/2001).
The Member Status box also contains a "Learn more about Plaxo Alerts" link. Many members wanted to know more about the various sections in their Plaxo Alerts. The "Learn more" link gives you quick access to a Plaxo help page that provides greater explanation of each type of alert.
In our continuing series on the new Plaxo Alerts:
One of the improvements we've made to alerts is to visually separate them into 3 categories. This should help you recognize and handle alerts more quickly.
Green - "New Connection Alerts" - A contact in your address book has granted you permision to connect to their Plaxo card. The connected entry in your address book will be automatically updated each time the other Plaxo member changes their Plaxo card information. The "Green" alert also allows you to easily send and share your own Plaxo card information with the other Plaxo member.
Blue - "New Contact Info Alerts" - An entry in your address book has been updated. This occurs when someone responds to an Update Request you've sent, or when a connected Plaxo member in your address book updates their own Plaxo card information. The "Blue" alert will show you what information was changed.
Orange - "System Alerts/Important Messages" - Plaxo was unable to process a set of your instructions due to a problem. For example, an Update Request may have bounced or been throttled, or we may have failed to validate one of your email addresses. The "Orange" alert provide you the details of the problem and steps you can take to fix it.
We'll continue to tweak and improve the alerts over time, but if you have any questions, comments or feedback, please let us know.
Some of you may have noticed our new Plaxo Alerts recently rolled out.
Based on member feedback, we've redesigned the alerts to make them more informative and useful, helping to enhance your usage of Plaxo. We'll post some upcoming blog articles that discuss the new layout and features of the new alerts, and we'll continue to tweak and improve them over time.
But unfortunately, with the rollout of the new alerts, we also discovered a minor problem. Normally, a member receives an alert notification anytime an entry in their address book is updated through Plaxo. A bug in the new alerts caused a small percentage of Plaxo members to receive some alerts where no contact information had actually changed. No address book data was corrupted, but the alerts may have been confusing. We've fixed the problem, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Should you have any questions, concerns, or feedback, please let us know by contacting our Support Department.