February 7, 2008 4:10 PM PST
Google to buy Plaxo? $200 million worth of data
Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.
I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.
Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can interweave into its other services.
Data that could be used to map out a wide-ranging social graph.
Valleywag pegs the number to be paid at $200 million. For that data, I'd pay a lot more.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
