Plaxo is acquired by Comcast, Zyb by Vodafone

Ok. This is last week’s news.

But, I am not seeing much discussion about this. Why?

Mashable picked it up right away. But not one person commented on Plaxo’s own site (link below).

Is this significant? Does it matter? Does this remind you of 1999 when Telcos bought Web-heads and did nothing with them?

FWIW, I just deleted my Plaxo account. Never really got anything out of it. BUT, with Pulse, they had an uncanny way of adding things I was thinking of. I think Pulse could have been like FriendFeed (and was about much earlier), but it happened to be attached to a company that made its name in corporate contact management. Eh. Brand dissonance.

Also FWIW, Zyb announced it was picked up by Voda two days later. Their post got a bunch of comments. Zyb was on a similar trajectory as Plaxo. Both were considered the leaders in this area, but we always felt Zyb a better mobile offering. (and I did not delete my Zyb account just yet)

We followed both closely since synch is a part of the (ever) upcoming Ovi.com that I was a part of (and Nokia also has the My Nokia Back Up service). Yeah, both companies had set out to mix PIM back up with social networks. And, yes, the company who can solve this issue will do well.

Do you think Zyb and Plaxo have done well with this fusion?

Link: Plaxo’s Personal Card: Comcast to Acquire Plaxo; Pulse to Become Central to Creating Unified “Social Media” Experience Across the Web, the TV (and more)

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.

2 Comments

  1. Not sure if you got the previous comment as it’s not appeared here, but I also wondered why the significance of Zyb’s acquisition was not picked up more in the blogosphere. I’ve blogged on why I think the mobile phone address book is your real social network for a while and the potential of making the address book the aggregation point for communi-content and lifestreaming, microblogging etc…. services seems huge, to me at least…

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