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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 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:

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.

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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.

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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 million previously rumored. Comcast is the most active buyer in the bunch. In fact, they’re getting a bit of a reputation as the guys who’ll look at any deal, and don’t quibble much on price. If no one else will take you, there’s always Comcast.

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).

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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, it’s not hard to make a little money from data like this.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web - linking.

Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The two standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know.

Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

Google is taking the resulting data and making it available to third parties, who can build this into their applications (including their Google Open Social applications).

Third parties are already jumping on board. Plaxo is adding the data to their Pulse profile pages to show additional relationships among users.

Companies can use this data as they please. A simple example is to remind a user of their Google-determined friends, and ask them if they want to add them on the new application, too.

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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 confirming the deal is “100%” happening. Our sources (and common sense) say its very unlikely any offer has been made, let alone accepted, and that Facebook may be just one of many companies taking a look at Plaxo.

Let’s look at the numbers. Plaxo reportedly did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has just 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore), less than 2% of Facebook’s 100 million monthly visitors. At current growth rates Facebook is adding around 10 million unique visitors per month. Putting this deal into perspective: Facebook grows a Plaxo every six days or so. And Comscore says 25% of Plaxo visitors are already coming to Facebook anyway.

Plaxo’s users also visit the site infrequently compared to Facebook users. Facebook’s 100 million visitors generate 42 billion or so monthly page views. Plaxo sees just 11 million page views per month, a tiny fraction of that. As an aside, Facebook generates the equivalent of a month’s worth of Plaxo traffic every 10-15 minutes.

Why would Facebook part with the rumored $200 million for a service that is so relatively small?

Crazier deals have been done, but this one isn’t happening (yet). Plaxo is a valuable property. It has a large professional social network and a great new product in Pulse - the sort of anti-Facebook news feed in that it pulls stuff from a variety of social networks instead of just Facebook. But it’s value will be greatest to someone that doesn’t already have those assets. Facebook does.

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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 every one of your friends, and pulls down their contact information.

Plaxo could have done most of the work via the Facebook API (and in fact we covered a startup called FriendCSV that does just that). But the Facebook API doesn’t allow exporting of a crucial piece of data, email addresses. In fact, emails are shown as images instead of text on Facebook so that scripts cannot easily download them.

So Plaxo avoided the API and went with screen scraping. They developed optical character recognition software to recognize email addresses and add them to the export.

Facebook doesn’t like this, of course. But it isn’t Plaxo that’s paying the price. It’s the journalists and bloggers who’ve been testing out the service. Robert Scoble was banned yesterday from Facebook for running the script. He received an email from Facebook that said “Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.”

Plaxo was certainly aware of the risk. In an email from the company asking me to try the service last week, they said “We don’t know whether Facebook will try to shut us down (despite their increasing verbal support for the concepts of open-ness), so we want to let a few key folks have access to the functionality before we make it available to everyone.”

Yeah, they guessed right. Plaxo started running automated scripts against Facebook without any warning or discussion with them beforehand, in violation of their terms of service and, I’ll add, common sense. Of course users were shut down. Facebook must regulate this kind of behavior, without it the service would crumble.

Beyond the automated script issue, Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy. Robert Scoble may be perfectly fine with having my contact information be easily downloaded from Facebook, but I may not be. Ultimately it should be me that decides, not him. And if Plaxo wants to push the envelope on user privacy issues, again, perhaps they should at least have given Facebook a heads up. And be prepared to take the consequences themselves instead of passing them off to their users. Robert Scoble was Plaxo’s lab rat in this experiment. I’m glad I wasn’t one, too.

Update: Loren Feldman basically agrees with me.

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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 “Contacts Detail” view. Plaxo’s Pulse product provides a lifestreaming service, so this will bring in social activity of contacts such as on blogs, Digg, Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yelp, and other sites into Outlook. Plaxo’s sync functionality allows users to add and sync details with users as they add them in Outlook as well.

I’m not a Windows user so I didn’t have Outlook to test the service on, but I am a happy user of Plaxo’s Mac OS X sync tool. I’ve written previously that it’s a great service and if the Outlook plugin is as good as it sounds it’s likely to find a willing user base.

The new Plaxo for Outlook can be downloaded here.

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It didn’t take long for someone to hack the first OpenSocial application. In fact, it took just 45 minutes.

A developer who goes by the alias “theharmonyguy” and describes himself as “just an amateur” claims to have compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote (see the Plaxo blog for details on the application). Specifically, he claims to have added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.

In an email, McCrea said he added all of the emoticons himself and his account doesn’t appear to be hacked. But when I asked theharmonyguy to hack my Plaxo account he did, within minutes, adding four quick emoticon messages such as “michael arrington is getting my bling on” and “michael arrington is w00t” (see image to left, none of those were added by me). theharmoneyguy then added one more to McCrea’s account, which will be difficult for him to deny:

theharmonyguy also pointed out specific problems with RockYou’s code, including some fairly humorous comments:

Some interesting code in there. For one, the app still doesn’t seem to be live for most of us (John McCrea from Plaxo has used it somehow) - it currently loads a “Please wait” iframe that never changes. But check out these code comments:

// TODO: no error checking - we’re bold…
// TODO: figure out why this is necessary???

Also, the code constantly branches between Plaxo and “default,” which appears to be Orkut. In fact, there are some hardcoded names that I bet showed up in some OpenSocial screenshots somewhere:

if (getContainerType() == “orkut”)
{
friendIds[iNumFriends] = “11285577331363942034″;
friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Raymond Chan”;
iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1;

friendIds[iNumFriends] = “15479081059638046412″;
friendNames[iNumFriends] = “Jia Shen”;
iNumFriends = iNumFriends + 1;
}

theharmonyguy says he’s successfully hacked Facebook applications too, including the Superpoke app, but that it is more difficult:

Facebook apps are not quite this easy. The main issue I’ve found with Facebook apps is being able to access people’s app-related history; for instance, until recently, I could access the SuperPoke action feed for any user. (I could also SuperPoke any user; not sure if they’ve fixed that one. Finally, I can access all the SuperPoke actions - they haven’t fixed that one, but it’s more just for fun.) There are other apps where, last I checked, that was still an issue ( e.g. viewing anyone’s Graffiti posts).

But the way Facebook setup their platform, it’s tons harder to actually imitate a user and change profile info like this. I’m sure this kind of issue could be easily solved by some verification code on RockYou’s part, but it’s not inherent in the platform - unlike Facebook. I could do a lot more like this on FB if Facebook hadn’t set things up the way they did.

Oh, Facebook apps can also be prone to injection - I can insert any FBML I want onto the canvas pages of one popular app. But once again, I can’t really do anything, because to interface with the app requires me to have code related to that app, which isn’t generally available. Not sure if Google’s iframe implementation will be the same way.

Of course, the ability to change emoticons isn’t a particularly malicious hack; but the ease in which this was done suggests that Google has some work to do in getting its new platform stable. If they don’t, more damaging stuff may be on the way.

Update: Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect, says he has taken the application down for now:

Hi, just caught this thread now. Michael-thanks for the info. It does look like something isn’t quite working right. While I suspect it’s benign, e.g. some of the rockyou code not distinguishing between the “owner” and the “viewer” of the gadget (this stuff is not always easy to keep straight), I want to err on the side of caution, so I’m going to de-white-list the gadget for now.

As is, we’re maintaining a strict white-list so we don’t have any random would-be hackers messing around, and the platform itself is still a work in progress. Hopefully the benefit of seeing some real working OpenSocial code in production is worth bearing with a few kinks that need to get ironed out.

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Plaxo has released support for Google’s OpenSocial initiative. The API’s are currently at 0.5 release so Plaxo warns that things are likely to change as OpenSocial moves forward, however in their words “we want to make sure that everyone who’s getting excited about it has a place they can channel their energy and get things running sooner.”

Plaxo support for OpenSocial consists of

* users can now add OpenSocial gadgets to their Pulse profiles
* each gadget also has a full canvas page inside Pulse
* Plaxo supports complete profile and contact info for the profile and friends-list APIs
* support for storing gadget prefs via the people data APIs
* gadgets can create activity streams and publish activity data, which will show up in the Plaxo Pulse stream with rich rendering support
* each activity can be commented on like normal feed items in Plaxo Pulse

Plaxo has also implemented OpenSocial gadget support into their new Dynamic Profiles feature, allowing users to show a separate profile (photo, bio, contact info, interests, etc.) to business contacts and personal friends.

Ning To Go Live Friday Night

We also have unconfirmed news that Ning will be rolling out OpenSocial as an option to its 115,000+ social networks on Friday evening. It will be in beta/sandbox format, and network owners will be made to understand that the API may change one or more times before it’s stable. (Update: Ning is now live with OpenSocial)

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Pulse, which launched earlier this summer, is Plaxo’s foray into social networking. After years of collecting users’ contact information and address book contacts, they took the next step and created a social network around all that data.

One of the big features they added was a place for users to add information about what they are up to on any of dozens of other social networks - sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, etc. You then see a news feed on your Pulse pages that includes information on what your friends are up to. It’s very much like the news feed on Facebook, except its based on third party data.

Tonight they’ve launched a way for users to take that personal social network data and include it on another website via a widget. Once you have a Pulse account and have entered in a few of your feeds, you can grab the widget here. A RSS feed for this information is also available.

30Boxes may have been the first startup to innovate in this space. FriendFeed, an unlaunched startup we covered earlier this month, is also doing something very similar, as will other startups.

I’ve embedded the Plaxo widget below.

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