Deals, joseph smarr, opensocial, brad fitzpatrick, facebook, google, mark zuckerberg...

Google to buy Plaxo -- and a new pal -- for $200 million?

Best buddies Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability, and so on — and I'm sure you'll read plenty of that. I think the real reason is much simpler. Brad Fitzpatrick, the LiveJournal founder now leading Google's social-network strategy, wants to work with Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect. I sat with the two at lunch at the Web 2.0 Summit last year, and they got along famously.

Plaxo and Google are working closely on its OpenSocial platform, and Smarr incorporated Fitzpatrick's recently developed friend-finding tool hours after its launch. Would Google spend a nine-digit sum to keep an engineer happy? Sure. It's pocket change for the search giant. An acquisition would also keep Smarr and the technology he's developed out of Mark Zuckerberg's hands at Facebook. And to think, I didn't even need to map a social graph to figure that out. (Photo by silverisdead)

12:50 PM on Thu Feb 7 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,880 views
7 comments

Comments

Whocares at 01:37 PM on 02/07/08
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Wow, they must have gotten into a bidding war. There's a few other companies looking at buying Plaxo right now.
matto at 02:09 PM on 02/07/08
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Sorry, every time I hear "Plaxo", I think of some arcane product my dentist would guilt me into using.
Rock tha Hizzee at 03:34 PM on 02/07/08
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@Zoo: Oh please, no one wants their shitty web 1.5 product.
DaveMcClure500Hats at 05:25 PM on 02/07/08
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Connectedness Index: 37
Brought to you by Acura TSX

this sounds a lot more realistic than Facebook buying Plaxo.

my guess is the previous rumor was "creatively" constructed as a stalking horse for the true acquirer, which appears to be Google.

and it does seem like this would be a valuable acquisition for Google, which would be a win-win for both them and Plaxo...
zoli at 05:49 PM on 02/07/08
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Friendship or not, perhaps Plaxo will finally fix Google sync. Calendar more or less works now, but contacts are still nowhere (one-way only, I don't call that sync.)
ekivemark at 09:27 PM on 02/07/08
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Google seems a natural fit. Pulse is maturing nicely as a Social Network Aggregator. and Plaxo has been an early supporter of OpenSocial. Plaxo's syncing tools could be of real benefit to Google for not only gMail and Google calendar but also for Android. Plaxo already works with mobile phones and I believe has deals with some carriers to do mobile address book backup. All these things make their field proven
tools attractive.

And let's not forget - they have even worked out how to scrape data off of Facebook.

For more thoughts see my blog: [ekive.blogspot.com]
vijaymv_in at 10:28 AM on 02/08/08
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Wanted to know what is going to happen to Mark Jen working with plaxo who was fired from Google for blogging. It seems that google cant enough of him already.