Plaxo Over Facebook? Not yet.

The net was all abuzz today with the news of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account being deleted due to suspicious activity not conforming to the Facebook terms of use. I received a bunch of tweets from vaarious super bloggers via Twitter immediately with oodles of fresh tinyurl’d blog posts breaking the news. Scoble hopped on twitter a little later and described the slew of twitter posts as a “tweet storm.” I tried to hop over to the recently released twitterstats page to see what a tweet storm looks like. Unfortunately, twitterstat can’t handle the volume. I was able to get a rudimentary idea of the jump in volume using twitstat.

Of course after all was said and done Facebook reversed the ban and allowed Scoble to keep his own profile information if he would agree to not run data mining bots against their servers. Scoble wasn’t intentionally doing anything malicious, he just wanted to import his 4,999 Facebook contacts into his Plaxo profile.

Not that I need another social network to eat away at my time but I couldn’t resist kicking the tires on Plaxo’s latest Pulse beta after todays events. I haven’t had a lot of time to work with it but my initial experiences have been mixed. Profile creation and account setup are clean and simple and Plaxo offers so many hooks into other sites you are probabably already using like flickr, del.icio.us and digg. The del.icio.us import wasn’t working properly but that wasn’t my chief complaint. During intial account setup Plaxo offers to import your contacts from popular email programs like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and Outlook. After having recently imported just over 1000 of my Outlook contacts into Gmail I thought it would be the way to go. Unfortunately, after what seemed to be a successful import Plaxo displayed a list of only 18 contacts that would be imported. After the import was complete there were 90 additional contacts that were created from junk HTML code. Surely I don’t have to upgrade to the Premium package for $50/yr to get my contacts imported properly. For now I will just chalk it up to a bug in beta 3 and stick with Facebook.