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After months of rumors, Plaxo, the social contact service, finally announced today that it is, in fact, being purchased — by Comcast.

Aside from Comcast, both Facebook and Google were rumored to be purchasing the service at one point. Of all of those, Comcast may seem to be the least likely suitor, but thanks to a deal the two already had in place, Comcast apparently thought it was time to take the relationship to the next step.

And that next step is an expensive one for Comcast. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch is pegging the number between $150 and $170 million. Previous reports had suggested the company was looking to sell for between $100 and $200 million, so this sounds about right.

If those figures are true, it’s a win for investors, who pumped in slightly more than $20 million into the company. Sequoia Capital was a lead investor, and together with angel investor Ram Shriram, Sequoia helped orchestrate a change in course at Plaxo five years ago that led to the ouster of co-founder Sean Parker. Parker, who long had a vision to make Plaxo a widespread network upon which other services could be build, went on to help build Facebook. Plaxo never did fully realize that earlier, grander vision, but Plaxo did maintain a solid contact update service. After several years of relative silence, it emerged more recently to make significant strides.

Other Plaxo investors included Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, Cisco Systems.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo was founded in 2001 and at first it focused on creating technology for syncing contacts across email applications. But the company angered many by sending non-solicited emails to users.

It restored some of its luster when it launched a new service called “Pulse” last year. Pulse is basically the equivalent of Facebook’s New Feed, except you can use it to track what people do on sites around the web — if somebody you’re connected to on Plaxo uploads photos to Flickr, you might see those photos in your Pulse stream.

As anyone who covers social media has seen, these feeds are all the rage nowadays, with Pulse’s biggest rival (besides Facebook and other social networks) being Friendfeed.

The company has also become an outspoken advocate of “data portability,” a geek movement that is bringing together social networks and other tech companies, to create new ways of sharing user data between them.

With Comcast, Plaxo promises that this deal will help its quest to make the web a more social place:

Joining forces with Comcast is a real win for our customers, our investors, and our employees. Comcast has an exciting vision to bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers. Together, we will be able to help users connect with all the people they care about, across all of the devices they use, with all the media they love to consume, create, and share. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.

Also, I have Comcast coming tomorrow to install my cable. I wonder if they’re going to pitch Plaxo to me somehow? Or maybe I’ll just get an email about it.

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

This follows a rumor previously published by Valleywag asserting that such a deal is underway.

While these types of rumors should be taken with more than a grain of salt, others have reported hearing that Plaxo is for sale: Some have said Plaxo is looking for a price of $100 million and others that it has received an unsolicited offer of $200 million. Facebook, meanwhile could stand to gain a lot through Plaxo, as separate, inside sources have pointed out to me.

Also, Facebook may be inching towards Plaxo’s (and others’) vision of letting users freely import and export their data from any site, including social networks like Facebook, we’re told. Of course, there is a fascinating personal drama around the two companies, and a shared vision, both involving Plaxo cofounder and early Facebook president Sean Parker (pictured, above).

The positive: Technology and vision

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook could combine its social networking data with Plaxo’s large set of contact information. Both, broadly, want to connect you with who you know.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Plaxo could help Facebook gather data through its large user base, and through its plugins for email programs Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail, and Thunderbird as well as a plugin for instant message service AIM, among others. Plaxo has developed technology to sync contacts through its home web site and its plugins, to create a sort of universal address book. It has also developed native mobile syncing technology for Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems. Syncing between all of these different services is a very hard problem — that Plaxo has solved.

So, if the sale goes through as rumored, imagine your Facebook data starting to appear in all of these plugins. For example, imagine seeing Facebook’s information about your friends — their profile information, etc… — with Plaxo’s plugin.

Also, there are certain similarities between Facebook’s news feed, and Plaxo’s Pulse. Facebook news feed shows you your friends actions on Facebook — and came out in 2006. Pulse came out earlier this year and lets you see your friends activities from other sites, like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. It has apparently been growing fast (see our coverage of Pulse and competitor FriendFeed from last week).

Maybe Facebook data could start showing up in Pulse? When I covered Pulse and FriendFeed last week, as web-focused alternatives to Facebook’s news feed, a big missing piece of data was Facebook photos, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit pointed out. Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site on the web, according to Comscore.

The reality is that Facebook is going to coexist alongside the rest of the web — people will also continue to use other photos services — so perhaps Facebook wants a way to easily exchange massive amounts of user information between it and these other services.

Imagine, as well, more data from the web coming into Facebook’s news feeds. In an interview, Parker recently reiterated the vision of Facebook being a social operating system. Maybe Facebook’s news feed will start incorporating data from other sites. Note: Parker currently works at The Founders Fund, which recently raised a large fund for more, mostly-web investments last month (our coverage of the funding here).

Separately, Facebook joined the DataPortability workgroup last week. The workgroup is a set of leading engineers from web companies that are working together to develop standards for easily sharing user data between sites. I was skeptical about the significance of this news at the time, as many such workgroups and industry collaborations go nowhere, and it wasn’t clear to me that Facebook actually planned to let users export data. Now, I have to admit the possibility sounds a little more likely.

Plaxo has positioned itself as a tool of choice for syncing contacts within the data portability movement. It has also aligned with Google’s Open Social application platform, that lets users build applications across sites. Among other issues, if Facebook doesn’t open up, it will have to build its own, sophisticated syncing technology itself if it wants to mesh its data with the rest of the web. And it may find itself facing a sizable set of opponents.

Also on the tech side: Facebook and Plaxo both have strong engineering cultures. In fact, Facebook has hired away a number of top Plaxo engineers.

The negative: History and valuations

Of course, it’s the two companies’ intermingled history that could put a fork in such a deal. Parker was booted from Plaxo by its investors, including Sequoia partner Michael Moritz. Then, Parker became Facebook’s visionary first president — others in the company have credited him with charting much of the company’s innovations up through today.

There is still bad blood between Parker, now a partner at venture firm The Founders Fund, and Moritz, from what we know. There is also bad blood between Moritz and PayPal cofounder/Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel, as Valleywag noted in its article on the rumor.

“Sequoia had no chance to invest [in Facebook],” Thiel explained in a previous VentureBeat article, “because of the way they mistreated him at Plaxo. He’s been treated worse than he deserved.”

There are more big caveats on the business side of any such deal, of course. Facebook is now valued at $15 billion. Meanwhile, Plaxo has been rumored to be on sale for between $100 million and $200 million. It is hard to see how Plaxo — a battle-scarred company that has been through many investment rounds and management changes — could sell to Facebook and deliver a hearty return to its founders, leading engineers and investors.

Unless, of course, the interested parties at Plaxo believe Facebook’s valuation to be accurate — and if these rumors are true.

Facebook news feed has been a hit with users because it automatically displays the latest photos, newest friends, and other updates from your Facebook friends.

The problem, though, is that most people use any number of other sites as well — such as messaging service Twitter, video site YouTube, photo-sharing site Flickr, to name a few. There’s been no good way to see what your friends are doing on different sites around the web from one central place.

Now, there are two feed services, FriendFeed (screenshot, above) and Plaxo Pulse, that do a good job of solving this problem. I expect both — and especially Friendfeed — to become a hit this coming year, as I’ll explain, below.

FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse let you designate friends, then easily add feeds of your activities from other sites. The result is that each user sees a continuous stream of updates from friends — Twitter messages, uploaded YouTube videos, blog posts, shared Google Reader items, and much more. Both FriendFeed and Plaxo include community discussion features, such as commenting on others’ items.

Other startup competitors that are offer similar services include Spokeo and clip-sharing sites Plum and Clipmarks.

Friendfeed is becoming a valuable social hub. Get ready for more.

Within the past couple of weeks, FriendFeed has quickly become one of the main ways I track what interesting people are up to. It offers a compelling new way to communicate with people you care about, a clean, easy-to-use design and a small but vibrant community to connect with — the same factors that drew many people to messaging service Twitter when it began to grow quickly last year.

I’ve assembled a small group of friends who are also using the service — many of whom don’t know each other — and we’re starting to get some interesting conversations happening within FriendFeed on various feed items.

FriendFeed launched in October and has a lot of important details right that make it fun to use. Examples:

- You can add a feed from a site you use in just a couple clicks

- It takes one click to ask to subscribe to somebody’s feeds and one more click for them to approve you

- It’s easy to find people you want to keep track of: FriendFeed recommends new friends to you who are already popular with your friends (details here)

- Commenting on a feed item takes two clicks; it also lets you “like,” or vote to approve of, an item in one click

- Pages load really fast

FriendFeed also has a clever Facebook application (screenshot below). Once you install the FriendFeed Facebook app, you’ll automatically see your friends’ FriendFeeds if they also have the Facebook app installed. These people aren’t just fellow Facebook app users — once they add the app, they’re also your friends in the free-standing FriendFeed site. FriendFeed, in turn, shows all the activity you see on the Friendfeed site within Facebook.

To spur further sharing, FriendFeed has also recently introduced a feature that lets you see feed items from the friends of your friends. To be clear, it only shows friends of friends who have made their feed public (an option on the site), and only when one of your friends likes or comments on the entry.

However, there’s no clear way to stop these pseudo-friends from seeing what you submit, as blog Webomatica notes in an otherwise positive review. FriendFeed says it’s working on controls to make that more clear. I think the feature is executed right, as is, because you’re essentially getting introduced to conversations with strangers via people you’re already friends with. It’s a mechanism for measured, viral growth.

Another plus for FriendFeed is that it’s formed a strong base of influential users. Primarily, it’s used by early Googlers and their many friends. The company was founded (and funded) by former Gmail team members Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh together with Google Maps engineers Bret Taylor and Jim Norris. It’s also getting championed by early-adopter bloggers like Louis Gray.

And, it recently brought in Kevin Fox, the user experience designer who worked on Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.

In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a spike in the number of tech geeks and bloggers using the site.

Note: Most feed items, from what I’ve seen, currently come from Twitter, Google Reader shared items, direct blog feeds, and social news sites Digg and Reddit, with a generous smattering from photo services like SmugMug and Picasa and music services like Last.fm. That’s judging from what I’ve seen on my Friendfeed friends’ feeds and on the site’s public feed, an aggregated feed of all members’ publicly shared items.

For more background on Friendfeed, see our earlier coverage.

Plaxo Pulse: Larger than Friendfeed, and growing

Meanwhile, Plaxo has been developing a similar concept. It’s a feed of what the people you’re connected to within Plaxo are up to on many of the same sites you can see on Friendfeed — Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Delicious, etc.

The service is getting big. More than one million people are using Pulse per month, up from 250,000 in November, with close to two million daily pageviews, the company says. Anecdotally, I’ve been getting an increasing number of invites from friends who are using it. Screenshot:

Not everyone is taking these invites well, due to the company’s history. Back in 2003, Plaxo was taken to task for sending spammy emails between users, asking people to update their contact info in their friends’ Plaxo address books. The person supposedly asking their friends for updates often didn’t know that their friends were receiving these emails.

“Plaxo Pulse is the latest in Plaxo spam. I get 20-30 of these a day. It’s nuts and as far as I can tell there is no value in the service, ” investor and blogger Fred Wilson twittered in early November. Others have more recently suggested to me that Plaxo is letting Pulse send out a high number of email invites to grow user numbers quickly.

The company should be forgiven for its past behavior at this point, although when it tried its latest initiative — extracting friends’ emails from Facebook (our coverage) — it got mixed reviews.

In fact, I think Plaxo has gotten overly conservative with giving users control over who gets to see what. It’s created different categories of friends for you — personal friends, family, work colleagues, etc. — that FriendFeed doesn’t bother with. Here’s how ex-Googler Charles Hudson explains the problem:

With Plaxo Pulse I have to “friend up” my pulse network and make decisions about which people I’d like to allow access to which types of data. In addition, I have to classify my contacts by the nature of our relationship. I initially found the privacy controls on Plaxo to be useful, but now they’re becoming a bit tedious to manage. FriendFeed makes this process a lot easier.

Plaxo is on the right track with Pulse. Its advantage is that it is much larger than Friendfeed and already has the email addresses and friend connections contained in its existing services. But Friendfeed comes across better on many fronts: Trust, ease-of-use, successful Facebook integration and an influential user base.

Friendfeed, which isn’t disclosing its traffic numbers, says it is focusing on fine-tuning the product before it aims to grow.

Plaxo, meanwhile, says it has kept Pulse in a sort of open private testing mode, and has yet to promote the service to many of its users.

Facebook news feed vs. web news feeds?

Facebook offers its own set of applications that duplicate popular sites on the web. For example, it offers its own photo-sharing service — the number one photo sharing application on the Web, with twice the traffic of its nearest three competitors, according to ComScore (via Jeremiah Owyang). Still, it is hard for me to imagine Facebook creating a set of services that can beat the entire web, including sites like YouTube.

There are too many competitors, too many valuable services that people aren’t going to stop using just because Facebook offers the same thing. Latest example: Twitter has maintained its role as a sort of messaging service where each of your posts answers the question “what are you doing?” — even though Facebook introduced a status update service last spring, that asks you “what are you doing right now?” within Facebook.

Rather, Facebook and the web will co-exist. Friendfeed’s Facebook application already shows this happening.

Also, FriendFeed (and in my opinion, Plaxo) may end up offering more than Facebook to other web startups. As Michael Arrington wrote when FriendFeed launched:

“FriendFeed will be a social network itself, of course. But it may also allow niche social networks, focusing on just one thing like movies or music, to thrive while simultaneously allowing users to have a single feed to aggregate all that they are up to. That means Facebook and the other giants don’t have to be everything to everyone (or at least that people don’t have to use it that way).

In what is at least a brilliantly executed PR move, leading engineers from Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the Data Portability Workgroup — an effort by a number of web companies to develop best practices for sharing user data across sites and applications.

Google’s Brad FitzPatrick and Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr — two long-standing advocates of data portability — are joining. More surprising is the addition of Benjamin Ling, a former Googler who recently joined Facebook to help lead its developer platform.

Maybe Facebook will eventually let third parties fully export all of its user data, letting users do things like export their Facebook friends’ emails en masse to other applications (see our coverage of Plaxo’s back-door effort to do this on Facebook, last week).

Maybe, through this workgroup, Facebook will iron out how that feature might be implemented?

For now, though, the glass of fully portable social data is far less than half-full — Facebook is just agreeing to talk directly with these other companies about such possibilities.

Nevertheless, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, thinks the news is a “bombshell.” Duncan Riley at Techcrunch says “this day will be remembered.”

Given the initial hype — much of which has now deflated — around Open Social, Google’s nascent social networking application programming interface, I feel compelled to stay a little more skeptical about the significance of this news until I see concrete results.

Here’s what DataPortability is up to, in a nutshell:

“[A]mong other things, [We're] actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.”

In other words, a fuse may be lit but no bombs will go off until all of the workgroup member companies actually define and agree on standard ways of sharing data across sites. I hope these companies will, but they haven’t, yet.

Plaxo, the contact manager service, has been testing a way to 1) collect all of your Facebook friends’ names, email addresses and birthdays from their Facebook profiles, using optical character recognition technology, then 2) export this information to your Plaxo address book.

I was about to test the service out this morning.

The company had already been testing it with blogger Robert Scoble. As a result, he just got banned from Facebook. Now I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should run the service — do I want to have all of my friends’ contact information in one place, or do I want to keep using Facebook?

Here’s how Plaxo gets your email. Facebook currently displays your email address on your Facebook account as an image. Screenshot, above, taken from my Facebook profile. As McCrea described the exporter to me: “So, We cooked up some adaptive optical character recognition foo….”

In other words, Plaxo takes the image of your friends’ email addresses and figures out the text of your email address that the image represented. It does this for every friend you have on Facebook, then exports and syncs all of this information with the other contact information contained in your Plaxo account.

Here’s how Scoble got busted. Facebook detected Plaxo running a script that processed these images for all of Scoble’s 5,000 friends — this action violates Facebook’s terms of service, so the company banned him.

But, before he was banned, Scoble was able to use Plaxo to match up more than 1,800 of his Facebook friends with his existing contacts in Plaxo.

While Plaxo wasn’t planning on releasing this service for a couple of weeks, the company has let Scoble explain what he was up to, here.

Facebook really is the main place that I socialize online, because that’s where most of my friends are. Apparently, I now have to choose between having all of my contacts in one place, or continuing to use Facebook.

Two updates!
Plaxo, a company that syncs your contacts’ details across your email and web services, has reportedly hired an investment bank Revolution Partners to help sell itself.

Update 1: The New York Times reports that the company is asking for as much as $100 million.

Update 2: PEHub reports that the company has been offered $200 million to sell, and has yet to hire a bank.

The hiring of Revolution (?) follows earlier reports that the company is trying to sell itself.

It’s worth noting that a couple of other venture-backed Internet companies have hired banks to help them sell themselves — at least according to our sources — including social news site Digg and social network Bebo.

Plaxo declined comment.

The company has released a stream of new products built around the concept of a “social graph” — the connections you make with others on social networks, through your email, IM and phone, and other forms of digital communication.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company launched a service called “Pulse,” in August, that displays your friends’ latest activities on sites like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr within a cascading stream on its own site (our coverage).

More recently, it introduced a way to see Pulse through Microsoft’s popular email program Outlook (our coverage), via a plug-in. The idea was based, as far as we can tell, on Facebook’s “news feed,” which shows you the latest activities of your Facebook friends. Plaxo claims Pulse has one million unique monthly visitors, a significant increase from the 250,000 it had at the beginning over November.

I find the service most useful for occasionally syncing the address books on Gmail, my Mac, and on other sites.

Who would want to buy Plaxo? Some of the more obvious potential purchasers — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. — already have access to millions of users’ address books. Google, at least, is working on its own sort of “social graph” aggregator. That company is rumored to be working on a similar sort of activity stream for Gmail, that lets you see what your Gmail contacts are up to on other Google products. Other tech companies may want the contact information data and services that Plaxo has — maybe Cisco, one of the company’s investors, that has recently been buying web companies (our coverage)?

Plaxo claims to have 20 million total users for its addressing syncing service, with another 15 million additional accounts hosted on other sites through partnerships.

The company has previously raised more than $28 million from Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, and angel investors including Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle. It most recently raised $9 million from Duff Ackerman & Goodrich.

Plaxo keeps taking substantive steps towards creating one address book that syncs across your communication services.

Now, Plaxo is offering a way to share your contacts and your calendar information back and forth between Plaxo and Windows Mobile. You can synchronize between Plaxo and Windows Mobile via your computer or your phone. You need to be a paying Plaxo member to access the service.

Plaxo already synchronizes your friends’, family’s and and coworkers’ contact information from email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, Mac OSX and the address book in Internet Explorer. It also works with the iPhone.

The Windows Mobile sync is a logical service to charge, because many business people and others already have business contacts in Windows Mobile and Microsoft doesn’t offer a comparable way to extract your contacts.

The service had gone into pre-alpha testing back in August.

updated

Here’s the latest action:
1. Alibaba launches its own ad platform
2. SpiralFrog losing money rapidly
3. Viddler launches way to advertise at “tagged’ points within video
4. Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader receives mixed reviews
5. Advertising technology startup Clickable raising $3 million more
6. Hope you can afford a helicopter — Flying cars don’t work
7. Automattic’s founders, getting ready for cash out?
8. Google buying switches for network?
9. SuccessFactors has SuccessfulIPO

Alibaba launches its own ad platform — The third-biggest ad platform may soon turn out to be Alimama, which was launched today by Alibaba.com. Alibaba, you may recall, is 39 percent owned by Yahoo, and recently went public at a high valuation. Its ad network will try to dig into the spaces that Google Adsense and Baidu Union haven’t yet reached; according to the company, it already has 150,000 small websites and 135,000 bloggers ready to use it. TI is splitting revenue 50-50.

SpiralFrog losing money rapidly — SpiralFrog is a startup begun by a small group of large music companies. Despite the “free” music downloads it offers, it’s bleeding cash, according to Read/WriteWeb, with Q3 revenue of $20,400 and losses of $3.4 million. There may be a cautionary tale therein for other music startups, or just an indictment of the site’s model, which involves barraging users with ads and surveys at every turn.

Viddler launches way to advertise at “tagged’ points within video — It lets you overlay ads at certain points within a video. For example, a guitar ad can be displayed when someone on the video is playing a guitar. The advertiser knows the video clip is related to a guitar because the producer “tags’ that video clip as being about guitars. More here

Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader receives mixed reviews — The Financial Times has a good roundup of media reactions to the Kindle e-book, which we mentioned last week. Most comment on its less-than-pleasing appearance, but a few analysts are optimistic about its chances in the market.

Advertising technology startup Clickable raises $3 million more — Previous backers Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures have reportedly reinvested, after investing $3 million previously. [Update: The company says it hasn't finished raising the funding yet.]

Hope you can afford a helicopter — Because you’re not getting a flying car anytime soon. Moller, the maker of the M400 flying car, is out of money and has “substantial doubt” that it can go on. [via Jalopnik]

Automattic’s founders, getting ready for cash out? – Rumors are that Automattic, the parent company of the popular blog software Wordpress, is about to raise a round of capital from its backer, Polaris, that could cash out some of its executive team, i.e., give them substantial cash (as opposed to providing the company with the cash) in return for some of their personal shares. We’re told by a good source that the deal hasn’t gone through yet. Polaris confirms, saying: “We have stay a little mum on this for a few more weeks.” CEO Toni Schneider isn’t commenting.

Google buying switches for network? — We asked Google over the weekend about reports that they’re buying switches for some sort of telecom network. Turns the networking is for their own data centers. Check out the jobs on their site, which Google pointed us to, which suggest what it is doing: Lots of job openings for hardware and software engineers with networking backgrounds, for example here and here. Andrew Schmitt seems to have the details on Google’s plans.

Plaxo shows explosive growth after OpenSocial integration — Plaxo, once spurned because it was considered to spam you with update requests for its contact management service, is growing once again. “I’ve never seen a growth chart with such a sharply pronounced inflection point,” Plaxo marketing executive John McCrea tells CNET. “Within hours of the Google OpenSocial social network service unfolding, it was surge conditions here. Our service almost buckled.” See the full story here.

SuccessFactors has Successful IPO — Despite mounting losses, San Mateo, Calif. based SuccessFactors held its initial public offering. The online management tool provider’s market cap is now at about $650 million. The big venture capital winners are Greylock Partners, who owned almost a third of the firm, and TPG Ventures, with just under 20 percent. Cardinal Ventures, Canaan Partners, Emergence Capital Partners and Granite Global Ventures also held stakes.

Plaxo, the online address book, will try to recreate itself as an open social network called “Pulse” beginning Monday.

In retrospect, you should have seen this coming. Plaxo is primed for this.

The Mountain View, Calif. company tells us it has 15 million people with registered accounts (we’re not sure how many of those are active). Many of those users, in turn, have imported their contact information from other services, such as Hotmail, AIM and Gmail — giving Plaxo an even larger reach than its registered numbers.

It’s no wonder it now wants to move beyond being an empty shell of contact information.

With Pulse (screenshots at bottom), each Plaxo user will be able to view their existing contact lists organized according to business, friends, family and other categories. It also includes a view of a stream of RSS feeds people whose contact information you already have in Plaxo.

Pulse uses Plaxo’s existing method of sorting contacts into business, friends, family members and other categories. The company launched a calendar service in late June that we noted looked similar to the event management feature of Facebook.

Plaxo has taken another step in that direction — the running stream of RSS feeds imitates Facebook’s news feed.

While Facebook displays all internal information about friends’ activities within Facebook, Plaxo will display RSS feeds from a wide range of popular web sites, including Amazon, Flickr,YouTube, LiveJournal and many, many others.

However, the division of contacts by type is a feature many Facebook users have wished for as their social, work and family networks blur.

The service is straightforward, from what we can see in these screenshots, below.

Scoble talked to Plaxo about it last night: He and his commenters have a lot more to say.

updated

Plaxo, the contacts updating service, was popular briefly a few years ago but then started irritating people — it would constantly ping you with update requests from friends and solicitations to join Plaxo.

In short, it got a reputation of being “evil,” and then turned quiet, and we wondered if we’d ever hear from it again.

But tomorrow, the company launches with a promising new release. It’s a complete overhaul, and extremely ambitious. In some ways, it looks like it wants to target Facebook.

First, it lets you sync your Plaxo account with the contacts lists and calendars of whole variety of services, including Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, MSN and Max OS X. It also provides a mobile version (http://m.plaxo.com) that makes it easy to access your contacts book, make calls and manage your calendar.

It provides the automatic synchronization features Plaxo is known for: After the initial sync, whenever you add or update a contact in Outlook, for example, it is automatically added to your other accounts. Say goodbye to that hassle of inputing names of contacts into your phone when you already have the name in your Outlook. From now on, they’ll already be there.

It is more ambitious than just a contacts service, however. Co-founder Todd Masonis and VP of marketing John McCrea showed us how it seeks to offer good part of your daily planning activities and communications with friends. If you think of the sync service as Plaxo’s “platform” offering, the ability to share with friends is the “application” that sites on top. It is the ultimate mashup site. For example, a link in a contact card allows you to call the contact with Jajah, the Internet phone service — convenient because it is cheaper than most alternatives. Plaxo also lets you import photos from Flickr, to adorn your calendar. Within the Plaxo dashboard, you can share three weeks of your calendar with friends, track upcoming important dates such as birthdays or wedding anniversaries, and use a mapping service to find driving directions to your contacts. The list goes on.

This is a departure from the “invisible” strategy Plaxo pursued. It is now unabashedly a destination site.

Moreover, Plaxo offers you the equivalent of Facebook’s “feed” which shows you updates from your friends. Called “Pulse,” Plaxo’s version lets you track most of your friends’ activities (if they allow you to track them, that is). If they post photos on Flickr, you’ll see that. If they publish a new blog post, you’re notified. If someone adds a book to their Amazon wishlist, you’re notified — and so on. Like on Facebook, you can choose which friends you want to be informed about, and what activities you want to follow. The only difference from Facebook is that Plaxo is limited to tracking only your contacts.

Some of this is built with help from the employees Plaxo picked up after the acquisition of Hipcal calendar service last year.

It is also offered in French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese.

Unfortunately, the sync with LinkedIn is a premium service. A $50/year subscription gives you this, backup and recovery, 24/7 phone support, the ability to store more than 1,000 contacts, and the ability to remove duplicate contact and calendar entries. Also, syncing with Google’s Gmail contacts doesn’t work yet, because of Google’s poor API. Syncing doesn’t work with Hotmail either. Both of these syncs will be made possible in coming weeks, Masonis said.

In other news, Plaxo is about break-even. It signed a deal with Comcast to offer contact synchronization services, and Comcast pays for that. Since 2001, Plaxo has raised $19.3 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, Globespan and Cisco. It also raised $6.7 in stock warrants two years ago.

There’s a video demo (see this page) which shows the site’s numerous other versions.

Or see Robert Scoble’s video below:

[Our sync with Outlook didn't work when we tried. Plaxo makes you download a toolbar for syncing with Outlook, because Outlook resides on you desktop and Plaxo needs a way to access it. While we successfully downloaded the toolbar, Plaxo wasn't able to complete the synchronization. We assume this is a bug in the initial version. Update: Or perhaps its because we have more than a thousand contacts; though, if that's the reason, it's disappointing that Plaxo wouldn't prompt us to upgrade. We were able to successfully sync with other services though.]

Based on an overview of the service, though, we may start spending more time on Plaxo — and likely less time in Outlook and Gmail. However, there’s one big caution. Once Plaxo is installed, incoming emails in Outlook carry an icon prompting you to add a contact in your address book if they are not already there. You can add with a single click. That’s cool, but then the service asks you if you’d like to message the person for their latest contact info. The default is yes, but you have to click either yes or no to continue; this is something that errs dangerously into Plaxo’s old spamming ways — as it tries to get other people to sign up with Plaxo. When you think about it, this is no different from getting an invite from LinkedIn or Facebook. At least this time, Plaxo is offering a more substantial service when it pings you. The other concern is that Plaxo still asks for more information about you during sign-up than most services, including birthday, full contact information, etc — although you don’t have supply much of it.

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Here’s the (updated) latest action:

Marc Andreessen getting taste of what it’s like to be a blogger – The Netscape co-founder launched a blog last week. The NYT ran a story about one of his earliest posts. Then he did a good piece about how to hire. And now all the attention has him racing out more posts, including a three part series on The truth about venture capitalists, all very good reads (here, here and here). I recommend reading the last of these, to understand why the debate about the bubble will continue. Marc, welcome to the blogger treadmill.

Video-sharing site Revver’s CEO Steven Starr steps down — This is the second shakeup in six months. No more details given about the change, other than the obvious context: Lots of competition. The company has been losing executives. (CNET)

Xing to buy Plaxo? – Unlikely. A rumor at Techcrunch says Xing, the German version of professional networking site LinkedIn is buying Plaxo, the contact updating service. However, we’ve been told that this isn’t happening. There could be big announcement over next week or so from Xing, though.

Eye-Fi raises $5.5M for camera Wifi — We have the story on VentureBeat NewsWire (for our hard-core readers, here’s another reminder to check that left-hand column).

Apple in talks with major Hollywood studios to get more new films for rental service — The WSJ has details: Will be launched in the fall, and cost $2.99 for 30-day rental of movies. Details are still speculative, though, on who will be participating.

Yigg.de, a remarkable rip-off of Digg.com, gets funding — This is German clone, in both name and presentation. The amount raised is undisclosed but comes from angel investor Roland Metzger and Baytech Venture Capital, the German company says on its blog. It reports 1.4 million unique users a monthly.

SplashCast, the multimedia Flash player, raises angel funding from poker celebrity Phil Hellmuth — Its funding is now about $2 million, according to NewTeeVee

Chris Yeh takes CEO job at Ustream — The company is a competitor to Justin.TV, which is the permanent webcam of a guy named Justin. Ustream wants to let anyone do that. We’ve mentioned them before in our story about Justin.TV’s move to try to do the same. (See Yeh’s blog)

Google worst on privacy? – If you read this report by Privacy International, you should also read the response by search expert Danny Sullivan, who tears it to shreds. Obviously, Google has its own issues with the report, quite emotionally so.

What happens when you piss off attorneys? – Well, you get sued. We reported how Avvo, a site that rates lawyers, had launched, and that some lawyers were upset. Now, one of them is close to suing.

Internet radio station companies fight back — The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruled to increase royalty rates earlier this year, starting July 15. RealNetworks, Yahoo, Pandora and Live365 say they’ll be paying more than $1 billion per year.

Gamemaker of popular Desktop TD leaves to run company full-time — He’s joined with another guy, Kottke reports. They’re blogging here.

Private equity riches, will you be picking up the tab? — Blackstone Group, the high-profile buyout firm that plans soon to go public, filed more papers with the SEC that show it could be valued as high as $33.62 billion. Also, the filing shows Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman pulled down $398.3 million in 2006 which, according to Dan Primack, would place him only behind Steve Jobs on the Forbes list of highest-paid public company CEOs. So, as Blackstone issues shares to the public at the top of the private equity bubble, will you be the public investor to buy shares?

Yourminis, which are the widgets offered by Goowy Media, are now more easily compatible with desktop — Previously, you had to download Apollo from Adobe and a widget manager from Yourminis to use that company’s widgets on your desktop. Now, they’re compatible with Micrsoft’s Vista sidebar, without that step. Yourminis’s widgets can easily go anywhere, from blogs to social network pages to personalized homepages like iGoogle Pageflakes, Netvibes and now your Vista desktop. The interface for adding widgets, however, is a bit confusing, and could be simplified by reducing the number of necessary clicks. Goowy CEO Alex Bard assures us that improvements, including support for OSX, are in the works. More here.

The Founders Fund, the venture firm led by former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel, has hired Sean Parker, the controversial entrepreneur, who has just turned 27, as a managing partner.

Parker somehow attracts attention wherever he goes. He has already launched three well-known companies. At 19, he co-founded Napster, and his cheekiness drew anger from the recording labels, which eventually shut down Napster with lawsuits. Parker told VentureBeat last week, in an interview, that his time at Napster was his biggest lesson — about who to hire to run companies and who to take money from. “I wasn’t sophisticated enough, I didn’t know any better.” But Parker’s past still has some investors in Thiel’s fund nervous. Thiel responds: “Sean has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, in part because he’s been so successful.”

One person he rubbed is the big-gun himself, Michael Moritz of Sequoia — an early backer of Yahoo, Google and YouTube. After Napster, Parker co-founded Plaxo, a site that updates contacts. Soon, Parker was in peoples’ faces again. Some accused Plaxo of spamming, because of its constant update requests. During the post-bubble downturn, Parker got pushed out by Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, and there’s been silence over the real reasons ever since. There were reports of private investigators going after Parker. And things weren’t improved, Thiel says, when Parker wouldn’t let Sequoia invest in his next company, Facebook. “Sequoia had no chance to invest,” Thiel explains, “because of the way they mistreated him at Plaxo. He’s been treated worse than he deserved.” VentureBeat has contacted Sequoia for comment.

Without Parker, Plaxo has become more diplomatic — but almost too much. You never hear about it anymore.

Parker soon met Mark Zuckerberg in New York, after the young “Zuck,” as he is known, had launched Facebook. Parker helped Zuckerberg learn the ropes. He helped him raise money at great valuations — ticking off several VCs who’d wanted in on the deal. They first raised seed money from the Founders Funds’ Thiel, who Parker had met through Sequoia’s Michael Moritz — an irony. Facebook raised only $500,000, and it was profitable immediately. Facebook’s traffic rocketed, and the company went in red again after taking more venture capital from Accel Partners to expand.

While Zuckerberg has been widely acknowledged as Facebook’s leader, even by Parker himself, there’s little question Parker helped Zuck keep control and ownership. Zuck loves coding, so with Parker’s business sense the two were a great pair. Parker helped bring in Owen Van Natta as COO. Parker was one of four board members at Facebook (along with Zuck, Thiel and Accel’s Bryer). He hired former Napster employee Aaron Sittig to redesign the site as we know it. Parker obsessively negotiated with the owner of facebook.com to buy the domain. Parker also came up with much of what we see as the Facebook News Feed, and he believes that format is the future of communication on the Web. “The social graph,” he says, referring to the connection people have with others through multiple degrees, “is the critical ingredient.”

[Side note: See this link here for other details. It was written by Numair Faraz, a friend of Parker's who said Parker had tacitly agreed to the post. Numair forwarded it to us a couple of weeks ago. At the time, we ran Numair's blog post by Facebook's spokeswoman, who reviewed it, and declined comment. When we ran the facts by Parker, he clarified the following: Plaxo had two other co-founders, Tipping Point was not an inspiration for either Plaxo or Facebook, he met Facebook's Zuckerberg met in NYC and Zuckerberg had every intention of turning the site into a business; Parker just accelerated the process, he clarified. Finally, regarding Numair's comparison on Parker with Jim Clark (pictured above), the same comparison was made by Peter Thiel. In an interview, Thiel said Parker reminded him of Clark, who also founded three high-profile companies (SGI, Netscape, WebMD) but that Parker was twenty years younger: "He's just getting started," Thiel said. "The time horizon is really long."]

Parker’s self-acknowledged insecurity is what drives him to be edgy, but also to excel: “I’m still super insecure,” he said. Parker feels it in talks he’s having with entrepreneurs on behalf of the Founders Fund, he says: “I always feel like the underdog. I walk away from meetings asking myself ‘Did I add any value, or are they going to tell other people that shouldn’t talk with us?’”

Like many people at Facebook with ambition, Parker left Facebook quite early in the game. Facebook is firmly in Zuck’s grip, along with a few trusted “family” members, as his close-knit circle is referred to. Parker retains a sizeable chunk of Facebook shares. Others have left, impatient because Zuck won’t sell the company or give them more responsibility.

Parker says his three start-ups have also exhausted him, another reason for him to try out VC: There was “a lot of stress, a lot of conflict,” he said.

He said he joined Thiel because of Thiel’s maverick ways. Thiel is not a classic VC; he runs the firm with an entrepreneur’s bent, from his Clarium Capital hedge fund offices — swanky, we add, nicely perched atop the hills of the Presidio. Parker says too many VC firms are run by people who never launched and ran their own companies. At Founders Fund, Thiel is focused on investing in early-stage companies, and he’s given Parker a carte blanche to find the best companies he can, Thiel says. Founders Fund is investing a $50 million fund, and it is about to launch a second, larger fund.

That’s what Rolling Stone wants you to believe, in its latest edition. In a story called “Baby Billionaires of Silicon Valley,” Rolling Stone catches up with a group nine entrepreneurs who get together to strategize. This is another hype job, since none of these people are billionaires. (Update: Blake Ross, in comment below, says this is no secret society, and headline is wrong.)

From the piece:

That’s why they’ve gathered here tonight. This is one of the first meetings of a secret society they formed and jokingly called the Young Guns; a more apt moniker might be the Valley Brats. It’s an invite-only cabal of the most powerful under-thirty-year-old mavericks in town. Every few weeks they gather to drink, plot global domination, make friends and, mainly, just act their age. “We got sick of hanging out with older guys,” says the Brats’ gregarious founder, Rob Pazornik, twenty-six-year-old creator of an online shopping startup called LicketyShip. “All they talk about is mortgages and nannies. It’s like hanging out with your dad’s friends.”

Featured in the cover photo, from left to right: Blake Ross (formerly Firefox, now Parakey), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Matt Sanchez (VideoEgg), Robert Pazornik (LicketyShip), Seth Sternberg (Meebo), Todd Masonis (Plaxo). Also featured are Chad Hurley & Steve Chen (YouTube), and Bram Cohen (BitTorrent).