Social Networking: Is Plaxo for slackers?

Speaking of social networking and the million ways to do it, and speaking of invites, Plaxo seems to be making an ambivalent entry into the world of social media.  Facebook is steadily growing, Twitter seems to have leveled out around 20 million users and LinkedIn appears to have geographic pockets of popularity, but what is this social network that erratically, just when I've almost forgotten about it, popping up in my inbox with updates and invitations?Plaxo is advertised as an address book that can sync with your phone, Outlook, or, of course, any major mainstream social media site.  Creating a profile on Plaxo felt eerily similar to creating a profile on LinkedIn (without the whole inviting-everyone-I've-ever-sent-even-one-email-to stunt), and so far, the only thing that's happened is that I seem to have signed myself up for random, sporadic "Plaxo profile" updates.  Is Plaxo for the lax and relaxed or is there actually something to this site?

It's not entirely evident how this social networking site is different than all of the other social networking sites...or if it even is a social networking site at all.  It's got the ever-important, stalker-friendly status update tool (which it invites the user, with a pop-up dialogue bubble that you must address or it won't go away, to update "so your friends won't think your boring), and the ability to update every other online profile a user has created, but it doesn't seem to have much, besides its layout and lingo, of its own.  That, and it might be the only social networking site owned by Comcast.

Plaxo seems to be more of a information storing service than a social networking site, at least that seems to be how the two Harvard engineering students and Napster co-founder intended the site to be used.  The problem is that, in trying to compete with mega-sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, all it's really done is copy some of their features.  The hodge-podge this has created on Plaxo's site makes it unclear how one ought to use Plaxo?  Maybe this is just a product of the one-stop-shopping mentality, but it doesn't appear like Plaxo was even really trying to be innovative; although it was created before Facebook and Twitter, the features it shares with these sites were added, seemingly as an after-thought, once it saw how much they were catching on.  Of course everyone needs to know what you're having for lunch that day, Facebook and Twitter assert, so Plaxo's innovative contribution to social networking techniques might have been to "custom tailor" those status messages to just everyone in your address book, so your friends feel that personal connection with you (and so they don't think you're boring!)

Maybe it's just my recent ordeal with the "everyone in your address book" concept, but if you're going to market a site's main purpose as being information storing, don't try to make it look like you're competing with social networking sites.  Trying to use Plaxo for social networking would be rather ineffective unless you're somewhat of a social networking slacker, though they do have that convenient "invite all" feature.