Leaving Plaxo

I just had the enormously frustrating experience of trying to update a friend's address on Plaxo.

I joined Plaxo a few years ago -- it seemed like a good idea at the time. It promised to keep your address book up to date by automatically updating your address book whenever your friends updated theirs, if they were members of Plaxo.

But they have just revamped their operation to make it enormously difficult to navigate and use the system, and I spent a frustrating half hour with my friend's new e-mail address on my clipboard trying to reach a place where I could enter it. I was asked to update my status. I was asked to approve connections with six other people I'd never heard of in my life before. When, after about half an hour, I finally found the address book and could click on the thing to edit his address, I couldn't find the field to enter his new address. The only editable field was "Category" and I could not scroll the screen left, right, up or down to find any more fields. They've obviously designed their interface for monitors much bigger than mine, and until I can afford a new monitor, Plaxo is altogether useless to me.

Why is it that when these web outfits do one thing and one thing well, they suddenly leave their core business and try to become a shoddy imitation of Facebook? And in doing so, stop doing the one thing they did well, that makes them worth joining? I'm already on Facebook, I don't need another version. I'm already on Linked-In. I don't need Plaxo Pulse as well. And since they've made it impossible to do the thing I joined them for, I'm leaving. If they'll let me, that is.