Plaxola

Look at the fine mess you got me into this time, Stanley! I’m not sure how he does it, but Robert Scoble, God bless him, managed to inadvertently insert himself into the middle of yet another digital brouhaha — this time involving our favorite (“walled-in”) social network. Rubel, eat your heart out!

ValleyWag postulates this morning that the hoping-to-be-sold Plaxo may have “exploited” the original (and always congenial) Geek blogger when it let him test an as-yet untested tool to import his thousands of Facebook friends into his Plaxo Pulse account. The non-denial denial of Plaxo’s marketing chief supposedly gives some veracity to the Wag’s pesky post:

Plaxo executive John McCrea would prefer you didn’t think so. “Biggest regret? A lot of folks saying/thinking we took advantage of you. Bummer,” McCrea Twittered. Note that McCrea didn’t say he regretted actually taking advantage of Scoble.

And then the Wag snarked further by posting Plaxo’s PR pitch letter in which the publicist exploited the open portability movement (is it a movement?) to make her point:

In very early stages, this feature caused famed blogger Robert Scoble to lose his Facebook account. However, the Facebook Importer behaves quite similar to other address book import that Plaxo already uses including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. This is an interesting time for the walled vs open debate and Plaxo has been leading the way since the beginning with their support for open standards and OpenSocial, and this step is an interesting move for the future.

Poor Mark Zuckerberg. “Why’s everyone always pickin on me???” To your credit, Mark, your people saw the wisdom in letting Scoble back in. As for Plaxo’s PR firm, I suppose there’s some merit in having your pitch letter posted on Valleywag verbatim.