Leader: Social networking - comical, phishy or next big thing?

So you think you get a lot of spam? We know that as journalists we're not likely to get much sympathy but at Silicon Towers we receive a fair old amount of bulk nonsense. That mostly happens because our main shared email address is plastered all over our site and indeed in many places around the web. (For the record it's editorial@silicon.com. One more time won't hurt.)

In short, that means all manner of trawling bots - key spammer tools - can pick it up and add us to address lists. So we communally find upwards of 500 spam emails in each of our inboxes every day.

Now this junk takes many forms but occasionally we receive requests for our personal details from people supposedly using Plaxo. Don't get us wrong. To many, online Plaxo is an innovative service: a contact management system that also gives the option of sharing a person's contacts across a network.

But we've found Plaxo 'invites' from people we've never heard from or about before. We email them back - not using Plaxo - but get zero response. Funnily enough, it's as if they don't exist.

About a year ago, one of the silicon.com team contacted Plaxo to ask if they'd come across instances of 'Plaxo phishing'. "No," was the reply. "You're journalists. Surely you give out contact details all the time and can't remember everyone you met, right?"

Well, yes, but something still smelt fishy - or phishy, if you like.

Plaxo is a classic Silicon Valley internet-era start-up, backed by former Yahoo! CEO Tim Koogle and chipper this week after a further $7m in VC funding, some of it courtesy of Cisco.

In a news story silicon.com ran today the company's VP of engineering spoke out against those who portray the privacy record of Plaxo - and other networked contact systems, such as LinkedIn - as anything less than fine.

Responding to rumours that the company will one day sell user details for marketing purposes, he said: "The conspiracy theories around Plaxo are almost comical."

For many, the loss of one's identity has become a greater fear than any harm that may come to a physical possession, bar perhaps one's home. Lose a few choice contact details, passwords or digitally stored personal effects and there goes your life. Lose a device - a mobile, PDA or laptop - that they're stored on and (as long as you've backed up your data) big deal, spend a few hundred of your or your organisation's funds on a new one.

Services like Plaxo seem like a great idea to the tech world elite who think them up and fund them. Maybe some will find a profitable model in the near future. But to the rest of us they're just too much of an unknown.

We do know of colleagues and friends that are confirmed Plaxo users. But we're yet to be convinced that it's worth it for us to return those Plaxo requests.