Written on February 11, 2008 – 6:08 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is guest post by Reinout H.M. te Brake, Group Strategist for the Spill Group Holding
Google has acquired online address book, Plaxo in a “sub-$200m offer”, according to a blog on tech news site Wired. The site claims that Plaxo has accepted an offer and that the “purchasing company is most likely search engine Google.” The report has sparked various other online rumors, and follows a month of speculation about a major takeover bid. This followed a New York Times report at the beginning of January, which said Plaxo had hired investment bank, Revolution Partners, to handle a forthcoming deal.
Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect Joseph Smarr
Silicon Valley gossip site, Valleywag, posted a report responding to the Google acquisition rumors claiming that the deal was completed due to good relations between Google’s social-network strategist Brad Fitzpatrick and Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect Joseph Smarr. However a separate Valleywag report claims that cable operator, Comcast, may be bidding for Plaxo. Meanwhile CNet dismisses the Google rumor as “unlikely.”
In January it was strongly rumored that Facebook were seeking to buy Plaxo, also for $200m, yet this never materialized. A week earlier, the New York Times claimed Plaxo was due to auction itself for some $100m, with investment bankers recruited to handle the deal. Meanwhile, tech site, Techcrunch, this week cited a Silicon Valley insider as saying “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell.”
Mountain View-based Plaxo started in 2002 as an online address book service, but recently shifted its focus to social networking with the launch of Plaxo Pulse. This tool acts as a social network aggregator, providing Facebook-style news feeds when users’ friends update their profiles on sites such as Twitter, Digg, and MySpace. In January Plaxo joined Facebook and Google as part of the Dataportability Group, a body which is working on projects designed to let users of social networks to transfer data from one network to another.
So, who is up to speed here and can give me details!?
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Written on February 2, 2008 – 2:33 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I don’t know what they feed the developers at Plaxo but they just keep on coming up with new products and services. We have written about Plaxo a lot here at The Next Web Blog and there are two reasons for that. We like their service and they produce a lot of news.
Just today Plaxo launched a new feature titled ‘Plaxo Personal Card‘. It brings together all your publicly declared feeds or “me links” with the aggregated stream of content from Pulse. Also, it happens to be the first application of the new Social Graph API from Google which was released yesterday, as you can read on TechCrunch. As the guys from Plaxo say: “Now you can share with others one site that pulls all of your online worlds together.”
Sounds pretty fancy, and it actually is, since this means that they’ll compete with LinkedIn from now on. They both offer a public profile, combined with a network of your business contacts.
Plaxo has the advantage of offering a public profile and several syncing services, of which the address book function is the best. Yet LinkedIn seems more suitable for professional networking. Not everybody wants their potential boss or business relation to read your Twitter feeds or to watch those Flickr photos of that awesome party last night. You’d like to save that till you know them better. Of course, you could choose to leave the pictures and tweeds out, but what’s left then?
If you keep all those functions, Plaxo seems like the perfect way to gather all your published on-line content. And they’ve released it just in time, since Netvibes will soon launch their ginger version that includes the ‘My Universe’ option. As you can see on this screenshot of the closed beta version, it’s kind of similar to the Plaxo profile. But it’s not presented as a stream.
As we all know, combining and aggregating our on-line content that is now still scattered around different services is THE trend of 2008. Plaxo is one of the most innovative services in that field right now. And as long as they keep that up, we’ll keep writing about them.
Written on January 25, 2008 – 5:27 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Professional networking service LinkedIn announced today that they’ll open a London office. Chief Executive Dan Nye explained the strategic move in a statement:“LinkedIn has seen outstanding growth in Europe in the past year, and by opening an office in London we expect to accelerate our momentum and better serve our users in the European market,” LinkedIn wants to double the number of members, which is now 18 million.
According to Nye, LinkedIn should grow faster in Europe. They have more than five million members now, mostly in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.
“I think in 2008 people will start to see the difference between social networking and professional networking.” And professional networking is different in Europe, Nye says. “In the U.S., people do business over the phone, through email. It’s perfectly normal never to meet someone you’ve done business with. In Europe, that’s really unusual. It’s much more of a personal interaction that people want to have.”
However, Europeans, - and especially the Dutch - seem to like professional networking tools. It’s remarkable that one of the smallest countries is responsible for a large share of the LinkedIn European user base. We earlier reported that Plaxo is also extremely popular in the Netherlands.
There is still a huge number of people who have never heard of LinkedIn and Nye wants to target them as well and he has a ‘healthy’ budget for marketing. So far, LinkedIn’s promotion was merely through word-of-mouth, a pretty good buzz and its networking effect . Now it’s time for the not so geeky crowd to start networking.
Written on January 16, 2008 – 6:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Pulse is now available for your Mac Address Book and takes care of all your syncing needs. The Plaxo service wants to stay an ‘useful social application that helps people stay connected’. In order to live up to that mission, integration with the Address Book was necessary, according to the press release: “Since most of our members are busy professionals, it’s not enough to enable communication just within the Pulse website; we need to bring Pulse – and the unified address book underlying it – to the communication tools, services, and devices that they use.”
Isn’t that against the trend of moving workspace from the desktop to the browser? We asked John McCrea, VP of Marketing. His answer: “We are working toward a vision of the ’social web’ in which the social graph is able to turbocharge any site, application, or device with users to take their local piece of the social graph with them wherever they go.”
So it’s basically a way of making sure that people have access to their contacts wherever they go. Until full wireless Internet coverage isn’t a dream anymore, this sounds like a plausible reason.
Yet I do think that this whole syncing thing also is a way to tempt people to move their workspace to online applications, such as Pulse. By giving people the feeling that their stuff ALSO remains on their computer, they’re willing to give the online application a try. So this won’t be the last integration tool we will hear of in the near future. What about Google Calendar syncing two-ways with iCal?
Written on December 4, 2007 – 9:37 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Since Plaxo launched its Plaxo Pulse service it has seen another surge in its growth. The last time Plaxo published its numbers was in 2006 when it reported 15 million active users after it doubled its userbase within 6 months. Since then it has launched its popular Pulse service and the first live OpenSocial implementation.
“Dutch pageviews jumped from 2% to 6% of total”
Last week John McCrea (vice president of marketing for Plaxo) contacted me with an interesting tidbit of information regarding the growth of Plaxo Pulse. It seems that in terms of adding new Pulse users the Netherlands has the highest growth rate of all countries. Dutch Pulse pageviews jumped from 2% of total to 6% of total in one week. As you can see in the graph here, it is highly likely that Dutch users will overtake the UK to become the second-largest userbase outside the US.
Netherlands is light green; UK is dark yellow
There seems to be no special event that led to this sudden growth except the OpenSocial announcement by Google. However, the Netherlands is a very active social networking country with its largest social network (Hyves) adding its 5th million member somewhere this week.
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