Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg


• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big


• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"


• L is for Levchin, who never goes slow

Plaxo already supplies Comcast with address-book functions for its Internet subscribers. But Comcast wants to sell packages of video, Internet access, and phone service, including wireless. To really hook customers, it wants to synchronize those services — so, for example, you might get a caller ID notice on your TV, with the name matched from your email address book, and reply with a text message. Too bad Plaxo's Pulse, the project Smarr has devoted so much time to, doesn't play much of a role in that scenario.

The cable giant has been an active buyer of startups recently, and Plaxo already runs its online address book. Whoever buys Plaxo is likely to be after its engineers and its Pulse social network, not its legacy address-synching business. That's what we hear drew Facebook's interest. But Facebook has, as far as we can tell, dropped out of the bidding for Plaxo.

Facebook's cash is reserved for a massive datacenter expansion. And a stock deal would bring Sequoia Capital into Facebook as an investor. We hear Sequoia is keen on that prospect. Facebook's investors — a group which includes Plaxo founder Sean Parker, whom Sequoia forced out of the company — are not as sanguine about such a scenario.

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)

Wish Bear / Chris Saad: Formed the DataPortability Working Group in the hopes that his wish — that all websites would share their data — comes true for everyone. Although Saad is not a major player at a big Internet company, pretending to make wishes come true is still a lot of fun.

Tenderheart Bear / Brad Fitzpatrick: Helps everyone show and express their feelings. He helps his fellow Share Bears be as caring as they can be, as the most prominent developer to join the Share Bears. The Share Bears don't have a leader, but as the lead developer of OpenID and other open-source tools at blogging company Six Apart, now the poster boy for Google's OpenSocial platform, Brad Fitzpatrick comes closest to it.

Friend Bear / Dave Recordon: As a close friend of Tenderheart Bear and his replacement as spokesman for open technologies at Six Apart, is a kind and friendly bear. Sometimes he disagrees with his buddy over Google's definition of friendly. Thinks "the social graph" is the meaning of being a good friend.

Love-A-Lot Bear / Ben "Bling" Ling: is a pretty and perky bear who helps spread love and help it along wherever he goes, be it Google or Facebook where he recently defected to to lead its platform program.

Birthday Bear / Joseph Smarr: Plaxo's chief architect hates it when people forget birthdays. That's why he wants you to sync up all of your online identities, so no one misses out on your happy day.

Cheer Bear / Matthew Rothenberg: As the representative for well-liked and fairly open social photo site Flickr, is a very happy and perky bear, who helps everyone be their happiest and cheer up those who are unhappy, like those who work for Google or Facebook.

Grumpy Bear / Marc Canter: Teaches us all that it's okay to be grumpy and vocal about open standards sometimes, but it's also silly to let grumpiness go too far when your own philosophy rarely results in business success. Canter's PeopleAggregator is an example of both supporting open technologies and its irrelevance, the silver lining and the rain cloud.

Bedtime Bear / Marc Canter: So special that he captures the personality of two Share Bears, Canter is a very sleepy bear. He helps everyone get a good night's sleep and have sweet dreams of portable data.

Good Luck Bear / Robert Scoble: Isn't a developer and doesn't work for a major Internet player, but sheer luck has made Scoble an intriguing bit player in the data-portability movement.

Editor's note: This is Tim Faulkner's last piece for Valleywag. Faulkner has been a contributor to the site since May 2007.

Technically, the sale makes sense. Plaxo's chief platform architect, Joseph Smarr, is an engineering rock star, with many fans among the Valley's brainiac collectors. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is said to admire other members of Plaxo's engineering team. The process of synching multiple address books, Plaxo's specialty, is more complex than it sounds, and would save Facebook some trouble as it tries to become more of a hub for its users' online activities on and off the Facebook site.

Bringing the investors to terms, however, would prove troublesome. Michael Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, is said to be eager to get a stake in Facebook, however small, so it can claim to have had a hand in its success. It's a move he played skillfully in the first bubble when he merged a failing online bank, X.com, into Peter Thiel's PayPal.

Thiel, now a Facebook board member and venture capitalist in his own right, remembers that maneuver all too keenly, and believes Moritz got the better of him in the deal. Then, too, Moritz forced Sean Parker, now a partner in Thiel's Founders Fund, out of Plaxo; he next joined Facebook, and while he didn't stay long, he still owns a substantial stake in the company. Any deal that reunites Sequoia, Thiel, and Parker would produce a moment of boardroom drama the likes of which we haven't seen in a long while.

The talks aren't advanced, and haven't even reached the point of naming numbers. But Facebook's lofty $15 billion valuation gives it a currency for acquisitions. Will Plaxo take Facebook's paper? The decision, if it ever comes to that, will rest in part with Thiel. How delicious it would be to have Moritz at a disadvantage.

That's because as Plaxo's vice president of marketing, McCrea was surely aware that his company's PR agency was actively pitching reporters on the Facebook beat to cover the story. If that's not taking advantage of Scoble, I don't know what is — and if McCrea weren't taking advantage of Scoble in just this way, he wouldn't be doing his job. Here's the pitch Plaxo's agency sent.

"Alicia Mickelsen" 01/03/2008 02:10 PM
Subject: NEWS: Plaxo Pulse's upcoming feature breaks down the walls of Facebook - causes controversy

Hi REDACTED,

Facebook has one of the few walled gardens left in the ever-growing Open Social Web. And just today the evidence of this walled garden became apparent when a user tried to take their friend's public contact information and take it with them into another service.

Plaxo has been working on a new feature, a Facebook Import that gets the contact information of your Facebook friends - names, emails and birthdays - and pulls them into your Plaxo Pulse account. In very early stages, this feature caused famed blogger Robert Scoble to lose his Facebook account. However, the Facebook Importer behaves quite similar to other address book import that Plaxo already uses including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

This is an interesting time for the walled vs open debate and Plaxo has been leading the way since the beginning with their support for open standards and OpenSocial, and this step is an interesting move for the future. If you would like to learn about how the Facebook Importer works, how it's truly unique and new, and what Facebook's reaction to this first user means for future.

Let me know when you are available today, and I would be happy to put you in touch with Plaxo executives, including the lead engineer of the Facebook Import.

Thanks,
Alicia

Alicia Mickelsen
Breakaway Communications for Plaxo
156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 410, New York, NY 10010

The whole incident lets Scoble play martyr, rebel, and scamp. He knew what the consequences would be. He was not duped by Plaxo, which provided him the Facebook-scraping tool, into being an unwitting lab rat. "Yes, I violated the agreement. I sometimes drive 80 mph on the freeway too." We know. And "Have you heard of Gandhi? He didn't follow the law." Yes, he led India to independence from Britain, Robert. Although the Plaxo escapade certainly started conversations, the only result from this short-lived incident is some buzz for a third-tier social network and a blogger who doesn't need more attention. Should we start trying nonviolent resistance?

What Scoble forgets is that when Facebook was just a college project of Zuckerberg's, long before he raised any venture capital, he fought a running battle with the founders of ConnectU. While they sued him for allegedly ripping off their code, Zuckerberg's Facebook sued them over their attempts to grab data from Facebook. To this day, Facebook encodes email addresses as a graphic image, annoying users who'd like to copy and paste the information — but also frustrating automated scripts which, like ConnectU, would attempt to steal away Facebook's users.

Plaxo is one of many companies which believe that social-network data should be open and portable. Facebook — informed by the ConnectU experience — disagrees. What's true is that companies like Plaxo are envious of Facebook's success, and in arguing for openness, aren't pursuing high-minded ideals — they're seeking commercial advantage. "Open" is just another word for "gimme."

And Scoble? In acting the martyr, he's playing right into their hands. Sad to say, his massive list of "friends" isn't coming in handy. Only 284 people have joined a group petitioning for Scoble's reinstatement.

(Photo of Robert Scoble by scriptingnews; photomontage licensed under Creative Commons)

"I've never seen a growth chart with such a sharply pronounced inflection point," Plaxo marketing executive John McCrea told CNET. "Within hours of the Google OpenSocial social network service unfolding, it was surge conditions here. Our service almost buckled."

Of course, OpenSocial is thoroughly half-baked. The fact that you'll soon be able to throw virtual sheep at fellow Plaxo users should not have, by itself, driven usage up. What that tells me is that McCrea hasn't been doing his job. If some wonky API announcement mentioning Plaxo was enought to bring users of Plaxo's Pulse to 1 million, imagine what would happen if McCrea actually started marketing this thing.

• The New York Times: Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning
  
• O'Reilly's Radar: Hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and Six Apart
  
• TechCrunch: Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle
  
• Valleywag: Hi5, Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Salesforce.com, and Oracle

Guess the only way to find out for sure who's involved is to attend CampFire Thursday night on the Google campus. We would, but we have a thing against CamelCase. But bring us back a s'more, wouldja?

(Photo by russelljsmith)

Or, rather, pretty charts. They're easier, right?

Here's the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. destination social networks Orkut, Friendster, Plaxo and LinkedIn — all Google partners:

Here's the U.S. monthly visits for Facebook vs. some of Google's other varied new partners, Newsgator, Xing, Ning, and Salesforce.com. For the record, Xing and Ning are not related.

If I'm a developer, I'm still going to Facebook first. Google says these partners reach an audience of over 100 million users globally. But the problem is that all those users are in different networks. Viral success in one network won't necessarily spill over into another.

A better solution for Google? Rework its MySpace search and advertising contract on more favorable terms for News Corp., and in return, get MySpace to sign up for OpenSocial.

Look at what happens when you drop bottomfeeder Plaxo from the list of social networks and add MySpace instead:

The incentive for MySpace, of course, is that this solution would save News Corp. execs the hassle of looking up exactly what an open platform is, exactly. Or having to figure out how to look up definitions on the Internet. Or the Internet.

Hoffman, of course, is being perfectly cycnical in claiming he's trying to protect users' interests, rather than profiting from them. Of course, it's not clear whether or not this Bill of Rights would allow Rapleaf's TrustFuse to profit from selling that individually-owned data. But that's the beauty of such lofty, high-minded Web manifestos: They count for nothing but the appearance of good intentions.

I don't want my mom or potential employers seeing the Halloween pictures of me wearing a turquoise tank top that says "Mrs. Timberlake" in pink glitter. She'd have to go to therapy and I'd have to hit up the unemployment line.

Plaxo's motivations, of course, are purely mercenary. Everyone wants a piece of Facebook's magical billions. Where Facebook is weak, of course, are its not-so-private privacy settings. Your choice, when adding someone as a facebok "friend," is to offer them either an insulting (and easy to spot) "limited profile," or open the kimono, drunken party shots and all.

Plaxo, by contrast, offers more fine-tuned controls in its new Pulse social network. And, most importantly, for self-important self-promoters like podcaster Robert Scoble, it offers total control over how to spam your fans. The premise: Plaxo users will be able to designate contacts as dysfunctional family members, insincere friends, smarmy coworkers, casual acquaintances, or desperate hangers-on, and treat them accordingly — never leaving them the wiser as to their classification. Your friends will never know how limited you think they are.

If the goal is to boost its buzz, and with it the company's valuation, Plaxo's social networking bid certainly makes sense. The company's software already actively updates address books, but that's about as exciting a business as LinkedIn. The new Plaxo aims to be the Web's social butterfly. But before it emerges from the chrysalis, let's all stop and ask ourselves: Can we face the propspect of having another social network to update without going mad? At some point the old and familiar outdraws the shiny and new.

The real loser in this whole Youtube/Plaxo spam-a-drama is undoubtedly YouTube, which earned wrath from the quick-to-judge, quick-to-correct-itself blog Boing Boing by daring to associate with this black sheep. In his note to Boing Boing writer Xeni Jardin, Plaxo rep Joseph Smarr at least worked in a TechCrunch plug. YouTube didn't bother replying to Xeni's questions, but they're busy smelling their own rats.

Co-written with Gottfried the Intern

Share a YouTube video = share friend's email with Plaxo? [Boing Boing]