Plaxo Up for Sale
Contact updating service Plaxo has put itself on the block for sale, according to TechCrunch. According to the post, they have hired investment boutique Revolution Partners to assist in the sale.
Plaxo, which gained notoriety (and was considered by some a spammer) has made efforts recently to reinvent itself as a social network, via Plaxo Pulse, currently in beta.
The primary Plaxo service is an address book maintenance service. Users upload their address book and any changes to other Plaxo members who are in their address book are automatically applied on an ongoing basis. This basic service works really well but has two drawbacks:
1. Plaxo seems to feel obligated to email you about every change (along with a recommendation to upgrade to their premium service), leading to their reputation as spammers; and
2. More importantly, they've been unable to monetize that service effectively, as few of their users bother to upgrade to that premium service.
As such, Plaxo has sought to reinvent themselves as a social network, trying to position themselves somewhere between LinkedIn and Facebook. Its new Pulse service allows users to enter various feeds about themselves (Twitter, Delicious, Facebook notes, LastFM, etc). Users can then view a consolidated feed of their contacts. This is similar to what Spokeo offers.
Plaxo has also joined the OpenSocial consortium, which bring the promise of common standards and APIs, positioning itself for stronger social network offerings.
Which raises the question of the timing of the possible sale. Pulse is still in limited beta and while it may offer promise and potential, it's yet to show that it's ready to compete with the big guys. Meanwhile, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, Revolution Partners is hardly a household name and not the tier one firm you'd expect a social network with 20 million users to be using.
Perhaps Plaxo realizes that it's not ready to compete as a full fledged social network application. The core Plaxo application is a nice app and would be a nice product line extension for a Google, Facebook or LinkedIn. But it's not the centerpiece of a stand-alone company. Perhaps someone will buy them for the 20 million users and the social networking framework. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Comments