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.
(Credit:
Plaxo)
TechCrunch is reporting that Plaxo's Pulse has jumped "an order of magnitude" in adoption (from 200,000 connections to over one million), as Plaxo's VP of Marketing John McCrea notes on his blog.
Lesson learned? According to McCrea, "open" is good for business:
When we launched the beta of Pulse in August, we made a strategic bet -- that the market was ripe for an "open social network" (rather than yet another "walled garden").
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Caroline is reporting that Plaxo, the online contacts manager, is opening up part of its source code. As she writes:
The company has released the code for its new "Online Identity Consolidator," which can automatically discover a user's social-networking accounts across the Web and embed their related RSS feeds on a Plaxo Pulse profile.
It's only a small piece of Plaxo's overall architecture, but considering the service's vocal mission of openness and customizability, we'll likely see more announcements akin to this one--at least we probably ought to.
It's a good move by Plaxo in its efforts to become more than just a place to update one's address book online, especially as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others take centerstage in the social -networking scene.
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