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Is Plaxo for sale?

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plaxo.gifWith many social networking sites considered as hot items in the investment world, there are also rumors that online address book service/social network site Plaxo is also up for grabs.

According to Reuters, the company is contemplating an unsolicited offer worth $200 million and has hired Revolution Partners to be its adviser. However, both firms are tight-lipped on this issue.

Is this a logical step? Analysts believe this is the best recourse for any mid-tier company like Plaxo if they want to survive in this very cutthroat playing field.

Who’s willing to acquire Plaxo? Osterman Research head Michael Osterman said Facebook and LinkedIn might be interested because it makes a lot of sense for a consumer-oriented social network to augment its service by adding a business-oriented social network.

Well, this is not the last of any social network acquisitions. Osterman predicts bigger social networks will acquire smaller social networks over the next 18 months as a way to expand their business.

Originally posted on January 4, 2008 @ 10:49 am

Plaxo helps open up social graph

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plaxo1.jpgAs part of its ongoing support for the open social web as an alternative to walled gardens, Plaxo released to open source the code for an important new piece of software, an Online Identity Consolidator. The new software contributes to the community effort to create a public, user-controlled “social graph,” by leveraging the linkages people are publicly-asserting between the various social web applications they use, such as blogs, social and business networks, and photo/video sharing sites. In addition to releasing the Consolidator code, the company added features based on the technology to its recently-launched next-generation social network, Pulse, and published a Consolidator implementation site for developers.

A debate has been heating up within the Web 2.0 community over whether the future of the social web will be defined by openness, with users in control of their data, or by walled gardens, in which corporations assert ownership of their users’ personal information and relationships. The call for a user-controlled approach to consolidation of online identities gained momentum with the recent publication of a manifesto by Brad Fitzpatrick (in collaboration with David Recordon), entitled “Thoughts on the Social Graph.”

Today’s announcement is part of a broader strategy in support of the open social web, and follows recent moves by Plaxo to implement and endorse important open standards, including: SyncML, iCal, OpenID, and microformats.

Originally posted on August 29, 2007 @ 9:32 pm