With its launch of Pulse in 2007, Plaxo expanded into the social networking space, going beyond the address book to aggregate information feeds, like Flickr photos and calendars. Though the results were mixed (if not poor), its core business was attractive enough to draw the attention of Comcast, which acquired Plaxo for $150 million the following year. Since then, the company has tried to distance itself from its somewhat controversial past.

Last year, long-time CEO Ben Golub stepped down and was replaced by Justin Miller, who had been acting as GM. Under Miller’s direction, Plaxo has become increasingly focused on working its way back to what gave birth to the company in the first place: trying to solve the problem of “address book decay”, a fancy way of saying “keeping your address book up to date”.

Recognizing how many of us struggle to keep our contacts up to date, Plaxo began devising products that would enhance its service, like a “smart search” tool that would act as if it were an executive assistant, using algorithms to comb the web and the Plaxo database around the clock to keep your directory up to date.

Today, Plaxo unveils what it has spent the last year building: a new family of address book-related services and what it hopes will be its golden goose, the Plaxo Personal Assistant, a service that intelligently makes automatic updates to your address book so that your contact information is always relevant. This announcement marks a significant relaunch for Plaxo, in which the company will begin to officially segue out of social networking and return to those “address book roots”.

Now, if you’re like me, you have several partial address books that you keep in a number of social networks, Web-based email accounts and on multiple mobile devices and hard drives, and you find keeping them up to date and secure to be a huge pain in the ass. The Plaxo Personal Assistant is designed to address this fragmentation by ensuring that your address book remains up to date in near realtime, so you have current information when you need it.

To accomplish this, Plaxo has forged partnerships with publicly available databases, like information provider ZoomInfo, to allow its software to look for matching records with contact info in the data available in these hubs. It compares your address book information with the database records and, if it finds information that it thinks is more current, sends you a recommendation that you can approve or reject.

When you begin using the service, Plaxo will automatically alert you every time it finds more current data and seek your approval. However, the software is built to learn as it goes, so that, ostensibly, after accumulating enough data over a period of time, it will be able to auto approve — though the settings will allow you to choose. And, as the assistant may find multiple updates at one time, the service has a built-in interface that enables bulk approval.

As to the extent of Plaxo’s partnerships with data providers, CEO Justin Miller told me that the company is currently negotiating contracts with several other databases akin to ZoomInfo but was unable to share specifics for legal reasons.

As Plaxo is using scripts to crawl public data and compare it with your private info, security is an obvious concern. Miller assured me that Plaxo’s primary concern is keeping the 600 million unique contacts in Plaxo’s cloud private. During the process of vetting potential database partners, he said, the company was forced to reject several companies because they did not meet Plaxo’s security standards. Obviously, in light of Plaxo’s checkered history with spamming and data scraping, this is very reassuring.

In terms of pricing, Plaxo Personal Assistant is a paid service that will cost $79.99 a year — the equivalent of $6.67 a month. The Personal Assistant will be the premium subscription service in a set of address book management services, and Plaxo will continue to offer free services, like “Plaxo Basic”. Just as before, Basic will allow you to unify your contact information, access it from anywhere, at any time, yet, beginning today, the service will include the Plaxo “De-Duper”, a tool that scans your data for (and eliminates) duplicates.

The company also now “officially” offers apps for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. Miller said that a Plaxo Android app is on the way.

Plaxo will continue to offer its “Platinum Sync” service, which allows two-way, realtime synchronization of your address book across your various devices and hardware, providing a consistent, updated address book from wherever you access it. And Platinum Sync and the Personal Assistant can be purchased together at a discounted price.

In his “State of Social Networking” post in December, VC Mark Suster described Plaxo as an old guard and past-its-prime company that “never quite figured out what to do with us all once we were connected online”. This impression of Plaxo is not uncommon. And seeing as other digital address books, sync services, and tools, like Gist, Xobni, Network Hippo, WhitePages’ Hiya, and Soocial are trying to gain traction and market share in similar, if not the same, space, Plaxo’s relaunch today is designed to shake its reputation as a social network — and to establish it as the definitive resource for our contact info. (Because no one quite seems to have done that yet.)

The influence of the address book in our online social lives only continues to grow, and it has become a battleground. You know that when Google boots Facebook merging from its phone book on Nexus Ses, the players in the space aren’t messing around. Control over the address book is something to covet.

And considering that Plaxo told me it has added 380,000 new users with address books in the last year, it had some momentum going into its relaunch. But whether it can go from the fringe to the center of the conversation remains to be seen.

“We’re trying to put forth a new perception in peoples’ minds”, Plaxo GM Preston Smalley told me, “because otherwise they tend to fall back on old impressions”. At SxSW, Miller added, there are “a lot of sexy apps being launched”, but Plaxo’s relaunch and suite of new products aren’t intended to be flashy, nor focused on attracting page views, but on being seen as a utility for busy professionals. “Getting rid of Plaxo’s social networking”, Miller continued, is essential to getting back to the company’s bread and butter — keeping your address book updated, synced, and secured.

Social Networking in Web 2.0: Plaxo & LinkedIn

In my last post, I discussed the origins of social networking online, beginning with CompuServe, Prodigy, the Well, then the rise of AOL, Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Next began the era of “spam-based” networks of which Plaxo (founded in 2002) was the king.  Co-founded by Sean Parker (yes, the same one who worked with Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook), it encouraged groups of people to email everybody in their email address books and “connect” on Plaxo so that when any of their contact information was changed online it could by synchronized with everybody’s local computer version and thus we could all stay in touch.

There was a backlash against the Plaxo spamming yet it paved the way for everybody who came after them to get users to drive viral adoption and we’d throw up our arms and say, “oh boy, here goes another social network that my friends are going to spam me about” mentality that made it acceptable for everybody who came afterward.

And come after they did.  While Plaxo never figured out what to do with us once we were all connected online, LinkedIn did.  They formed us into networks of networkers.  It was suddenly now not only about whom I was connected to, but who they knew and how I could get access to them.  We suddenly all wanted intros.  It added a new dimension to online social networks … business networking.  And they encouraged us to part with a lot more data about ourselves making LinkedIn our virtual resume.

And importantly Web 2.0 ushered in the era of “participation” – we all know that.  But less considered is the fact that the success of the Web 2.0 companies versus the Web 1.0 ones were enhanced because they coincided with hardware that allowed us to capture more content instantly – namely images and video – otherwide Web 2.0 might have been a lot less differentiated.  Suddenly we were all creating blogs on Blogger.com, Typepad & WordPress.  We started uploading images of ourselves to our blogs.

But the masses didn’t want to blog.  They wanted to publish pictures of themselves & their friends, share them, communicate with others, stay connected, have common experiences, find people to date, etc.  As I’ve said, it’s the same shit as the 1980′s – I swear.

Modern Social Networking: Friendster, MySpace & Facebook

We all know Friendster was the trailblazer in this category allowing people to create personal pages and connect to other people in a LinkedIn style but without the “business” and with a little more interactivity (let’s face it, for the longest time most users “friended” people on LinkedIn but then never really did much else).  But Friendster’s computer systems couldn’t keep up with the explosive growth (reportedly due to the complexity of the security model set up to control connections, privacy and authenticity of users) so MySpace was hot on the heels and swept up the market in a very rapid ascent.  Friendster was DOA.

And there it was – MySpace was growing at the exact time we all had cheap digital cameras, smartphones with cameras and new, cheap video cameras like the Flip that allowed us to create video.

Except that MySpace didn’t handle images or video well.  Luckily Photobucket & ImageShack did.  So users put all their photos on Photobucket & their videos on YouTube and shared them with their friends through MySpace.

Fox bought MySpace for $580 million and then did a deal with Google worth more than the purchase price to serve up ads.  For a nanosecond Rupert Murdoch seemed like the smartest guy on the Internet.  Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, which at the time seemed laughably high and now seems prescient.  Google turned YouTube into one of the most valuable future Internet properties.  MySpace would have liked to own YouTube but didn’t have the public stock valuation to purchase them at the price that Google did.

MySpace later bought Photobucket for $250 million + $50 million earn out.  It did not have the same success as Google’s acquisition and MySpace sold Photobucket 2 years later to a relatively unknown Seattle-based startup called Ontela for a reportedly $60 million.

Murdoch seethed at these “startups” getting rich off the back of MySpace.  The conventional wisdom at Fox’s headquarters is that MySpace had “made” both YouTube & Photobucket by allowing them distribution.  MySpace vowed not to create anymore million dollar successes off of their backs that Google could then acquire.

So Fox ludicrously set up a quasi internal innovation center called Slingshot Labs.  The goal was to create innovations outside of MySpace and then MySpace would acquire them at pre-agreed prices based on how well they performed.  This was Politburo-style innovation and was laughable. I literally snortled when I heard that they were going to do this.  It was obviously a scheme set up by young entrepreneurs to line their pockets and some big-company executives who didn’t understand innovation.

Enter Facebook.  It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was.  Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t.  It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified.  MySpace was: scantily dressed, teenaged, middle-America, design chaos and on ad steroids.

But the critical distinction in the direction of both companies was that while MySpace was putting up moats to keep outside companies from innovating and making money off their backs, Facebook took the opposite approach.  It launched open API’s and created a platform whereby third-party developers could come build any app they wanted and Facebook didn’t even want (yet) to take any money from them to do so.  So along come companies like Slide, RockYou & Zynga who wanted to build apps across all the social networks but were green-lighted the hardest by Mark Zuckerberg.

It was at that moment that a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg completely schooled the 75-year-old Rupert Murdoch.  Within the next 12 months Facebook users doubled to 200 million while MySpace stayed flat at 100 million.  The lesson was learned over 30 years in Silicon Valley: you create ecosystems where third-parties can innovate and thrive and you become the legitimate center of it all and can tax the system later.  Ask Microsoft, Autodesk or Salesforce.com – the evidence was there from Seattle to Sand Hill Road.

Facebook went on become larger than even Google and Yahoo! in terms of time spent on the sites.  Slingshot Labs was unsurprisingly closed within a short period of time and its properties sold-off or dismantled.  Duh.

Social Networking goes Real Time: Twitter

While Facebook was built on the idea that all our information was private and shared only between friend (before they changed this after the fact), Twitter was born under the idea that most of the information shared there was open and viewable by anybody.  This was revolutionary in thinking and worked because as a user you understood this bargain when you started.  Twitter is not the place to share pictures of your kids with your family.

Another Twitter innovation was “asymmetry” because you didn’t have to have a two-way following relationship to be connected.  You could follow people who didn’t necessarily follow you back.  This allowed followers to be able to “curate” their newsfeed with people that they found interesting.  Twitter restricts each post to 140 characters so users often share links with other people – one of the most important features of Twitter.  So this combination of following people you found interesting who share links drove a sort of “news exchange” that mimicked many of the features of RSS readers except that it was curated by other people!

Twitter is much more.  I’ve written extensively on the topic, but in a nutshell it is: an RSS reader, a chat room, instant messaging, a marketing channel, a customer service department and increasingly a data mine.

But what is magic about Twitter is that it is real time.  In most instances news is now breaking on Twitter and then being picked up by news organizations.

The one major thing that Twitter doesn’t have figured out quite yet is that platform thing or at least how to encourage a bunch of 3rd-party developers to build meaningful add-on products.  Twitter seems to have become a bit allergic to third-party developers (or maybe vice-versa).  18 months ago 25% of all pitches to me were ideas for how to build products around Twitter’s API.  Now I don’t get any.  Not one.  Yet the number of businesses looking to build on the Facebook platform seems to have increased.

Given I’m a passionate user of Twitter, I sure hope somebody there will re-read the MySpace vs. Facebook section above.  Lesson learned (to me at least) – let people get stinking rich off your platform and tax ‘em later.  That way other companies innovate on their own shekels (or at least a VCs) and let the best man win.  Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital.  Seems kinda obvious or am I missing somethign?  Rupert?

Social Networking is Becoming Mobile: Foursquare and Skout

The trend that is unfolding before our eyes is that Social Networking is now becoming mobile and that adds new dimensions to how we use social networks.  The most obvious change is that now social networks become “location aware.”  The highest profile brand in this space is Foursquare.  Pundits are mixed on whether Foursquare represents a major technology trend or a fad but undoubtedly it has captured the zeitgeist of the technology elite at this moment in time.  At a minimum it has been a trailblazer of innovation that a generation of companies are trying to copy.

As our social actions become both public and location specific it opens up all types of future potential use cases.  One obvious one is dating where players like Skout are trying to cash in on.  When you think about it, young & single people go out to bars & clubs in hopes of meeting people to “hook up” with.  In a perfect world you’d like that person to be compatible with you in additional to being attracted to them, yet as a society we go into bars and have no idea what it behind any of the people we see other than the immediacy of their looks and whether we can get enough liquid courage into ourselves to talk with them and learn more.

It’s obvious to me that the future of dating will involve mobile, social networks that tell us more about the compatibility of the people around us.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how big people like Match.com and eHarmony became on the trend of helping us find our dating partners and why this would be improved my mobile, social networks.  How long this trend takes is unclear – but in 10 years I feel confident we’ll look back and say, “duh.”

FourSquare obviously brings up a lot of interesting commercial opportunities.  For years I saw companies pitching themselves as “mobile coupon companies” and I never believed this would be a big idea.  I’m not a big believer that people walk around with their mobile devices and say, “let me now pull out my device and see wether there are any coupons around me.”  I always said that if an application could engage the user in some other way – like a game – it would earn the right to serve up coupons as a by-product.  I think that is what Foursquare has done well.

In the future I don’t believe that Foursquare’s “check-in” game with badges will be enough to hold users interests but for now it’s working well.  I’ve always said that if Foursquare has a “second act” coming it could be a really big company.  In the long-run I believe that check-ins will be more seamless – something handled by infrastructure in the background.  So I expect more and new games from Foursquare in the future.  One awesome features of today’s Foursquare that often isn’t talked about is the ability to graph your friends on a real-time map and see where everybody is.  This is a killer feature for the 20 and 30 something crowds for sure.  Me? When I go out I mostly prefer to eat in peace with my wife and friends without people knowing where we are – I guess we all get old

In the next post I will make some predictions about where social networking is going next.  And only one hint —it isn’t all dominated by Facebook.  Stay tuned.  If you can’t wait you can get a sneak peak in the PowerPoint presentation below.

Golub says that during his time at Plaxo he experienced the struggles web companies have to go through to serve large amounts of data to large numbers of customers, which often involved quickly adding large amounts of storage capacity. He says that along with other Web 2.0 companies, large media companies like Comcast, which acquired Plaxo, have to deal with similar problems. Gluster helps deal with these issues, allowing services to use commodity hardware to store large amounts of data while also making it quickly retrievable (Gluster’s software will also work on enterprise-grade storage area networks).  The software has been downloaded around 100,000 times.

Plaxo wants to be the Google of digital address books but the newly minted CEO, Justin Miller, knows it will be a difficult and long slog.

Calling itself “Your Address Book For Life,” Plaxo synchs your address books and pulls in social data from more than 30 sites (like Twitter, Yelp, Flickr) through its Pulse service. The company is trying to design new products to enhance the service including a “smart search” tool that will essentially act like an executive assistant using special algorithms to comb the web and the Plaxo database around the clock to keep your directory up to date, according to Miller. That feature should be released later this year. The site currently has 20 million members in the Plaxo network and hosts roughly 50 million address books— online address book page views are up 100% year over year according to VP of Marketing, John McCrea.

Looking across the horizon, Plaxo has grander ambitions. Ultimately, the goal is to help users access their address book across a multitude of electronic platforms— not just your phone and laptop. McCrea envisions a time when you will be able to hop into your car, turn on your navigation device, say a friend’s name, prompting the device to pull up data from your cloud address book and guide you to their location.

That’s of course not in the immediate future. For now, the company is still working on an app for the iPad.

Meanwhile, Plaxo (which was purchased by Comcast in 2008 for roughly $150 to $170 million) is still trying to distance itself from a somewhat controversial past. In 2006 it wrestled with spam allegations and in early 2008 Plaxo came under fire for its data scraping techniques. All of that has been put to rest since the acquisition but the company acknowledges that there’s still a lot of work left on the PR front.

Miller and the VP of Marketing, John McCrea, dropped by our office to chat about their long term strategy, cleaning up their image and working with Facebook:

Here are a few excerpts from the transcript:

On the challenge of creating the definitive smart address book:

Miller: I think when you look back over the history of Plaxo starting in 2002, there was a great idea. Which is if everyone would put their information, their contact information, on Plaxo and they got their friends to do it when anyone updated their information all of our information would be updated and that’s great. The problem is not everyone joined Plaxo and not everyone keeps their information up to date. And so what we’re able to do, what we’re working on doing now is looking at how we can pull information from everywhere, around the web pull that together for you. But what’s taken so long, over that time, we’ve started looking at different opportunities. So a couple of years ago Plaxo started getting more and more into social networking it was this great space. And then more recently we started looking at business networking another great space but Facebook and LinkedIn are doing pretty well there right now. And recently we said you know what, there’s this need, this unsolved, unsatisfied need to create one place where people can come get all their addresses, and address book, contact information…together.

On Facebook:

McCrea: Scoblegate happened at a point and time where we weren’t collectively ready to understand the implications of users owning their data, having access to that data through open APIs, but now there’s clearly a march away from the walled gardens toward openness and operability…In a lot of ways this is a technical problem as it is any other.

On Spam:

Miller: “The perception of spam still exists in some people’s mind. It’s something that I’m really focused on when we think what the brand is. There’s a couple things we’ve gone through in terms of the history, one is spam, the perception of spam. And as John said everyone is doing it and it’s not really spam but you have that perception in people’s mind. Number two is: “Oh Plaxo is social network isn’t it?” or “Oh, Plaxo is a business network isn’t it?” No. We’re not spam, we’re not a social network, we’re not a business network, we are really focused on creating the best, smart, socially aware and pervasive address book.”

A lot has happened at Plaxo in the five years since Golub joined. The company, which builds software to help consolidate all of your contact information into a single address book (among other things), was acquired by Comcast in May 2008 for between $150 and $170 million. In the years before the acquisition, Plaxo had to deal with criticisms for making it overly easy to accidentally spam your friends with your contact information, and later got into hot water with some of its screen scraping techniques. But the service has cleaned up its act, and continues to work at making managing your contacts less of a hassle (a problem that is only getting worse with the popularity of social networks, not better).

This isn’t the only recent personnel change at Plaxo — last December, Plaxo CTO Joseph Smarr left to join Google.

Before joining Plaxo in early 2005, Golub served as SVP of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for VeriSign.

Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has their address book updated.

It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002.

But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book.

Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information.

There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m “subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time.

I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.

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 now. In fact, he was the first non-founder to join Plaxo and helped take the social contact list from a tiny company to one that was bought by Comcast last year for $150 million. Most recently, Smarr was officially Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer.

The transition to Google should be a pretty easy one of Smarr as he’s worked with them as a partner for Plaxo on a number of projects over the years. He’s also well-connected in the social web and is one of the leading advocates of open standards. In that regard, he closely resembles Marks, who is now with British Telecom. “Like all incoming Google engineers, my official title for the first year will be ‘member of technical staff’,” Smarr tells us. “The work is on turbocharging the opening up of the social web,” he continues. At Google, he’ll be reporting the David Glazer, an engineering director.

Smarr notes his excitement for the various technologies that Google has helped develop over the years to make the web a more dynamic place. He also writes that Google is “unmatched” with its commitment to the open web, and standards like OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and others (like Webfinger, a pretty interesting new one, based on an old concept).

That said, Google hasn’t exactly been the most social setting on the web, largely because its services are spread over such a wide range of areas. Facebook, in contrast, is largely a walled garden (that is trying to open up more, to the dismay of some) that has a tightly wound social experience. Google Friend Connect, a key part of OpenSocial, has not be able to gather the buzz that Facebook Connect has, but Google is clearly trying to help it gain steam. It recently revamped the service and even implemented Twitter to help foster its growth.

Speaking of Facebook, they recently hired another one of the key players in the open web, Dave Recordon, who came over from Six Apart. All of these guys travel in the same circles and their interests seem pretty aligned, so it will be interesting to see what, if any, relationships they can foster with their parent companies for the good of the open web.

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

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 directory. Instead, Glynx has a directory it calls the “Blackpages” that exists spread out on user’s computers. You can look up specific IDs of people you know by entering their email addresses or mobile numbers, but you can’t do browse it indiscriminately (this feature is supposed to make it more difficult for spammers to exploit the directory).

Glynx allows you to import your contacts from Outlook, Skype, and Facebook. It also offers a rich presence management tool that tells you when your Glynx contacts are online and the best way to contact them at any given moment. Finally, your Glynx ID also serves as an OpenID, making it easier to maintain a single identity across the Web.

Here is how the company describes the main benefits of its software:

Without Glynx, the web sites and service providers pretty much control how your information is used. They are in a position to watch your relationships and monitor what information you are sharing, and with whom. Your e-mail and messaging is increasingly full of SPAM and attempts to defraud you or steal your online identity. And your mobile connectivity and productivity is at the mercy of your service provider

. . . With Glynx your information stays on your PC. Unless, of course, you wish to share it with someone else – in which case it gets sent directly from your PC to theirs. No middle-men. But even before you share information, Glynx lets you know who you are dealing with. And you can know what each of your contacts is up to as soon as they do.

Glynx encrypts all entries to its distributed directory, and claims that nobody controls the directory. Thus, nobody knows what is in it other than the entries they have put into it or discovered in a piecemeal fashion.

Is this what phishers and spammers have reduced us to—looking for ways to hide in our own private Internet?

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 password credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time transfer of data. It is much more secure. And now it works with OpenID.

So far, this is just a test between Plaxo and Google, where a Plaxo member can invite someone via Gmail. Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea argues that this approach is:

- better for the user by being more convenient and more secure;
- better for the identity provider by not asking the user for their password and then scraping their data; and
- better for the site by delivering a higher conversion rate on signup flows and getting more useful data from the user.

It, of course, competes with another approach that is out there: Facebook Connect. But, then, that only works with Facebook.

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 of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.

AOL and MySpace are expected to jump aboard as OpenID providers as well. The only big holdout appears to be Facebook, which has its own competing Facebook Connect program. But even Facebook might eventually join the OpenID fold. (Its partners seem slightly less than enthusiastic about deploying Facebook Connect).

What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >>

A subset of the Gillmor Gang met via telephone this afternoon to debate the $150 – $170 million Comcast acquisition of Plaxo. Listen to Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and me talk about whether this was a smart move for Comcast, or a sucker’s purchase of a company no one in Silicon Valley would touch.

Listen here.

Plaxo has been the subject of considerable acquisition rumors lately, with both Google and Facebook named as potential suitors.

Plaxo says they will remain an independent organization in Silicon Valley. It will report into Comcast Interactive Media, which is a division of Comcast that develops and operates Internet businesses focused on entertainment, information and communication.

More from Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub:

Plaxo and Comcast have been working together for the past year on a number of initiatives. Plaxo is providing the universal address book for Comcast’s SmartZone communications center (slated to launch later this year), and we are also now hosting all of the address book accounts for Comcast webmail users. Our partnership has already more than doubled the reach of the Plaxo network, bringing the total number of accounts to nearly 50 million.

Together, we intend to deliver on a vision of making “social media” a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters. For example, you should be able to securely post family photos online in Pulse, and have them viewable by any of your family members, whether they are online, at work, on their mobile device, or in their living room watching TV. And you should be able to discover new shows to watch, based on what your friends and coworkers have recommended.

So, what about current Plaxo members? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue, but will continue to evolve and improve. In addition, both of our services benefit from “network effect,” which is to say that the more people who use them, the more useful they become.

On Monday I had an impromptu interview with Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea and Chief Architect Joseph Smarr. They still had their poker faces on with regard to the acquisition:

http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=480f08e7336849209ae3f175470b273b&vid=77202&playback=false&polling=false&user=techcrunch&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous

This ends a long and sometimes troubled history for Plaxo, which was founded by Sean Parker, Minh Nguyen and two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, in 2002. In 2006 the company finally abandoned it’s hated “viral” feature that tricked users into spamming their entire address book with Plaxo invitations.

More recently, however, Plaxo has been playing nice with the Internet. Last year they launched a popular service called Pulse, which pulls activity streams from other services into users’ Plaxo profiles. They were launch partners with Google Open Social, and announced support for DataPortability early this year. Even so, they still had the occasional misstep.

Update: The Gillmor Gang digests the news. Listen to the podcast here.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may – MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.

Things
This isn’t a web application yet, but hopefully one day it will follow Evernote’s lead and offer a web backup/ sync services as well. Things is a clean, simple Getting Things Done client for the Mac that’s helped me overcome my constant cases of email bankruptcy. It takes a little discipline (I process my email at once every morning and add everything requiring follow up to Things), but its been a godsend in terms of information management. Users can add links to emails, webpages, or simply make notes, and you can tag, categorize and set due dates on all entries. They’re currently testing iCal support, so I’m hoping that if this works well I’ll be able to sync the data, via iCal, across various computers.

Skitch
Michael put me on to Skitch initially and I’ve never looked back. Skitch is a Mac image editing tool that also links into web based image hosting. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it handles 95% of my own image editing needs. Simple, quick, brilliant.

See Michael’s review here

Plaxo

Plaxo is trying to be many things to many people, from activity streams through to social networking, but its core syncing product has unlocked my data across multiple computers and even my iPhone. Plaxo syncs data from your calendar, address book and elsewhere between computers. It can also pull data from LinkedIn and some Google services. This allows my laptop, desktop and iPhone to be always in sync, and in case of emergency I can get to my address book via the web as well.

TechCrunch coverage here

LinkedIn

I never really appreciated LinkedIn until Plaxo gave me access to the data elsewhere. LinkedIn remains the premium business social networking destination and I find myself regularly using details I’ve pulled from it. I use Facebook as well, but I find LinkedIn provides more value.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Twitter

Twitter is like being married, you love it dearly but some times you want to strangle it. Twitter has transformed my networking in the last 12 months. It served as a conduit to building new relationships in a way that Facebook, FriendFeed and others never will. I can walk into a tech meeting/ conference/ meetup anywhere in Australia now and although I may have never met anyone in the room in person, I’ll know at least one person (usually more) from Twitter; you cant buy that level of contact and its given me friendships and acquittances that could never have come around by any other means. Twitter still has problems ahead: like a complete lack of a business model, but expect Twitter to continue to grow, with somebody (maybe Yahoo, although Biz prefers a Google exit) acquiring the service before December.

TechCrunch coverage here.

Grooveshark

Until recently this would have been Seeqpod, but since reviewing the Grooveshark player I’ve found myself listening to music there regularly. MyPlayList is another service I’ve been using, although not as much. The bonus with Grooveshark is quality: as all songs are uploaded by users (legally) and the quality is usually first rate, where as Seeqpod can be hit and miss sometimes. I want to love Pandora, and I used it for years, but given it’s now georetarded I’m blocked out. Last.fm isn’t bad, but it’s not a team player in terms of the industry and it’s also owned by CBS; I’d rather support the little guy.

There’s probably others as well I’ve forgotten about. One last shout out to 37Signals: I’ve used their services in the past when running a startup and they’re great (I’m not using them today) but their management ethos is a breath of fresh air in a world where people who want balance should (apparently) be working at Starbucks. If I were local and looking for a job, I’d be begging for a look in.

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 company won one of the vote-in demo spots at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam (CEO Stefan Fountain pictured above), and their video demo featuring David Hasselhoff (shown below) stole the show. TechCrunch has 300 invites to the beta that you can grab here.

Soocial is not yet everything it could be, but it has a lot of potential, and its approach to syncing contacts is the right one. Right now, it supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail, 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app, and contacts in your Mac address book on your desktop. (You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac.) Support for Outllook on Windows machines is coming soon, as is syncing with LinkedIn, and contacts in Windows Live and Yahoo.

With all of these services and devices, if you add a contact in one, it updates your contact list and details everywhere else. This two-way syncing is what is really impressive. It even works with the iPhone, although only by syncing through iTunes on the desktop. Soocial also has a lame Facebook app, because Facebook does not allow syncing of contacts yet.

As more services open up with data portability and open APIs, Soocial will add them as well. All Soocial wants to do is sync your contacts no matter where you keep them. It is not trying to be a social network, and it is not trying to grow by spamming its users friends. “Not everybody has friends, but everybody has contacts,” says Fountain.

The startup is based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. It was founded in November, 2006. The business model is unclear, but the founders hope to be able to charge subscriptions to power users. Enjoy the video:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

(Photo by Anne Helmond)

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 potential signups by accessing the address books of its registered users. At least that’s what others have said, however I don’t recognize any of the names in the spam I’m now regularly receiving from the service, so it may well just be broad scale spamming of anyone and everyone.

I couldn’t find a lot of history on the company (in particular who bankrolled it). According to Wikipedia, Sms.ac was founded in 2001 and has over 50 million registered users worldwide. As an SMS provider the company has been accused of spamming people in the past, and a search of our archives found mention of the company in the comment threads on the Plaxo spam posts.

FanBox has been spamming people from at least the middle of last year. A search for “FanBox spam” in Google gives 5710 hits.

The spam from FanBox comes in a number of forms:

Registration Spam

You receive an email informing you that you’ve signed up for Fanbox and to click on the link to retrieve your password

Fan spam
[name]@Fanbox wants to be your loyal fan

Hi [name from your email] I’d note in my case it’s always my gmail account name, which isn’t my actual name but my company name
Yvonna@ FanBox wants to be your loyal fan!

Automatically sign in to view Yvonna@ FanBox’s profile and/or photo, and accept or reject her fan request.

Question spam

Subject: Karen has asked you a question on FanBox

Karen asked you a question. View the question and answer it.

Following the link usually takes you to a really vague and random question, like “Would you tell a lie if you knew it would not hurt anyone?”

Others have recommended that you should not click on FanBox links and most definitely not give them log in details for your email service. It’s wise advice.

To be fair though they are not the only people spamming my inbox at the moment, I still haven’t got around to blocking emails from Facebook apps, but at least there you now have a reasonable path to block the emails. Instead of offering a simple unsubscribe method, clicking on unsubscribe from FanBox gives you a full page of options, and no easy path to unsubscribing. I’d be concerned that clicking on any link from FanBox may simply result in confirming your email address to them as well.

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 Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing – namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

To be fair, some of my disdain for Comcast exists solely because they supply my cable and Internet at home, and really really suck at it. I believe I’ve spoken to every customer service rep they employ.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).