Back in March, long-time Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub left the social address book company after five years. Today, he’s announcing his next move — he’s taking the reins at Gluster, a startup that offers an open source software solution for storing very large amounts of unstructured data. Golub will replace current CEO Hitesh Chellani who is transitioning to become VP of… → Read More
As we become tethered to a growing number of social media sites, the contact information of our social network inevitably becomes more fragmented. Digital address books and tools like Gist, Xobni and Plaxo are trying to organize the white noise but no one has created the definitive hub.
Plaxo wants to be the Google of digital address books but the newly minted CEO, Justin Miller, knows it will be… → Read More
Plaxo President and CEO Ben Golub is leaving the company he’s led for the last five years, we’ve confirmed. Golub will be replaced by Justin Miller, who has been Plaxo’s General Manager for the last few months. As part of the transition, long-time Plaxo employee Ryan King will become Chief Operating Officer. Golub hasn’t yet shared his plans for the future, but we’ll have more information on… → Read More
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer Joseph Smarr late last year, but it’s Yahoo that’s finally adding the 8-year old idea of turning the address book model upside down and letting people subscribe to it rather than keep their own quickly outdated lists. They’ve launched a new feature called “Share my info” in Yahoo Contacts that is, like the old Plaxo product, a way to subscribe… → Read More
Back in June, Google lost Kevin Marks, one of the social web’s main proponents within the company. Today, they’ve gained a new one: Joseph Smarr.
Smarr is joining Google to “help drive a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web,” he writes on his personal blog today. And it seems like a good fit considering that he had been doing things of that nature for Plaxo for nearly 8 years… → Read More
Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned.
Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50… → Read More
Glynx, not to be confused with the recently released Ginx, is taking a peer-to-peer approach to identity management and in the process promises to help its users take back control of their online identities. After downloading the Glynx software to either a PC or a Mac, you have a Plaxo-like contact manager for online contacts, email addresses and phone numbers, except there is no central… → Read More
Today, Google and Plaxo released a hybrid protocol that combines OpenID, the open online identity standard, with OAuth, the secure data portability standard. Too often, when a Website wants to import your contacts from another Web service, it asks for your login and pasowrd credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time… → Read More
You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.
By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions… → Read More
Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because… → Read More
The rumors were accurate: Comcast will announce their acquisition of social contact list Plaxo today. Financial terms are not being disclosed, but the purchase price is between $150 and $170 million. Plaxo, which was founded in 2002, has raised just under $30 million in venture capital. Plaxo has been the subject of considerable acquisition rumors lately, with both Google and Facebook named as… → Read More
Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. → Read More
This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday – listen to… → Read More
Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This… → Read More
San Diego based FanBox from mobile solutions company SMS.ac offers a variety of services. From its front page it offers a reasonable web desktop package, complete with wordprocessing, IM and online storage. A social networking service is included, and the holding company sms.ac offers premium SMS services. It sounds like a run of the mill package, except that like Plaxo in the past, FanBox spams… → Read More
Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place. Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with… → Read More
Plaxo finally got bought, say valley whispers, and blog after blog have speculated incorrectly about who the buyer might be (first Facebook, then Google). Finally, someone may have gotten it right – Valleywag is saying that Comcast is the buyer, for $175m. That makes sense based on what we heard earlier today, too: that one of the cable players bought them, for something just under the $200… → Read More
San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs. There are other services that are… → Read More
In the words of one Silicon Valley insider that I spoke with today, “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell” for quite some time. Late last year they got serious and hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, to help move things along. The rumor mill really got going when Revolution Partners started making their calls and sending out the company’s… → Read More
Tens of millions of people have been busy the last few years building Facebook’s most valuable asset – their social graph. As people add friends, and those people add friends, Facebook gets to understand exactly how its users know each other. And as we saw with their “social ads platform,” where users essentially (and sometimes unwittingly) pimp services to each other… → Read More
At some point last year people started to realize that the email inbox was not only the “original” Internet social network, it’s also going to be the backbone of social networking going forward. You already have your friends (people in your address book), and the social graph is already filled (people you email, and who they email, etc.). Yahoo is clearly focused on this, for… → Read More
We know Plaxo is for sale, presumably looking for north of $100 million and telling people around Silicon Valley that they’ve had an offer for north of $200 million. Revolution Partners, an investment bank, has been pitching them to all the big potential buyers. There are now more rumors about the acquisition; specifically that Facebook is the buyer. VentureBeat is saying they have a source… → Read More
Joining the cavalcade of companies jumping on the open data bandwagon, LinkedIn has now joined Facebook, Google, Plaxo (announcement here) in joining the DataPortability Work Group. LinkedIn has worked hard to become open since announcing their own open platform in June 2007 in response to Facebook, then becoming an initial OpenSocial launch partner in October 2007. I spoke to the DataPortability… → Read More
After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have… → Read More
News leaked prematurely today about a new Plaxo Pulse feature that allows users to match Facebook contacts to Pulse contacts, and then import contact data about the matches into Pulse. Plaxo has been testing the feature with a number of journalists and bloggers. It involves running a script against Facebook. You tell Plaxo your Facebook account credentials; Plaxo then goes in to Facebook, looks up… → Read More
Plaxo, the Sequoia-backed start that transformed itself from a hated spam monster into a mild mannered and interesting business social network, has started a sale process according to a source. They’ve hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort. We do not know what price Plaxo is looking for. The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four… → Read More
Plaxo has announced a new plugin that brings Plaxo Pulse to Microsoft Outlook. Plaxo is claiming the new service is “historic;” its an extremely long stretch but this isn’t to say that the functionality isn’t interesting. With the new Outlook plugin, users can now see recent activity on a person’s Pulse stream in the Plaxo “Click to Connect” box and in Outlook’s… → Read More
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