Xing May Be In Talks To Acquire Plaxo

You’re not joking it hasn’t gotten any traction in the U.S. I’ve never heard of it.

Hmmmm….Isn’t Plaxo that service that came bundled with AIM? If so, I found it somewhat annoying - especially since it keeps contacting me.

Plaxo is evil. As is Accucard. Marketers’ dream.

Plaxo IS evil. Marketing scam all the way….your address + your phone number = $$$

Why is Plaxo always unreasonably labelled as evil, when their marketing practices as much the same as those used by every social network out there? Facebook, MySpace all have viral models, take similar user data, but do not receive the same amount of abuse…. Always a curious double-standard on this - if you are going to go after them then one not go after all the others? Plaxo has an incredibly strong, legally binding, privacy policy which stands up to better scrutiny that most of the other virally-grown networks. (Social networks must be by definition be viral or they can’t be social!). A former Plaxo employee, Terry Chay, has written an excellent study of this which is well worth the read:
http://terrychay.com/blog/arti.....spam.shtml

$250 million range. You gotta be yankin our chains. Xing? Plaxo?? You sure about that?

I’m very skinny guy without personal trainer. I’ve tried exercise many times and couldn’t pick up muscle. I’ve tried push up and pills and it didn’t work either.

How do you make 6 pack like brad pitt?

so it seqouia (plaxo) vs sequoia (linkedin) ?

Oh it would make sense - and I know it is a strange concept to some, but there is more on the world than just the US to get paying customers from …

Xing already has a much stronger contact management feature than linkedin (make that good versus non existent), but plaxo has as far as I can tell a great outlook implementation; the syncing process on Xing is not good, you can only download all of your contacts including all contact details.

Now, as long as they take on the good parts but not the stupid plaxo spamming feature …

A reason to leave Plaxo

@Olly becuase MySpace doesn’t intrusively take ALL of my Contact Info (name, email, phone, cell, address, etc) and compare them to ALL of yours. [And they don't annoy the hell out of you with their mails either....] I’ve listened to Plaxo’s vocal defense of their promises they won’t sell that database, but that db is a total goldmine for a marketing company. If they end up wanting to recoup some of their investment (i have no idea how they make money now anyway, i’ve ignored them for so long) but I’d look at that jackpot of marketing data and see big dollar signs. That’s a big difference over social networking. A lot of info on MySpace et all is fake anyway. My contact db is very real, as is yours. And I could compare mine to yours to Mike’s to whomever elese we’re all linked to endlessly= a goldmine.

and what about the itegration of linkedin at plaxo a few weeks ago? is the way to bring the german xing users to linkedin ?

a reason to leave xing

During a public talk two weeks ago, the xing CEO promised new features to manage the contact data of non-xing-members; so the integration of plaxo data would fit into this direction. However the current market cap. of xing is $270m; heavy lifting for an acquisition…

Rainer - are you sure you aren’t looking at the market cap of the Chinese company Xing? I thought the company we’re talking about here, formerly Open BC, had a market cap of around a billion Euros.

Michael,

You are probably wrong:

Market cap Xing/OpenBC Dec. 06
Euro 157 million
http://www.paidcontent.org/ent.....on-in-ipo/

Latest fixing (friday) of open business club ag on major german stock exchange markets: 38.5 EUR. With 26% free float of it’s 5.2m shares.
I doubt that the german capital market will be euphoric about merger of equals…

The most interesting things about these companies are their silly names. Plaxo would be a good mouthwash for removing plaque. Xing would be a great name for a spicy seasoning mix.

@Olly: Thanks for the props. I still hold to that viewpoint so I hope more people read it: http://terrychay.com/blog/arti.....want.shtml
I also do understand where the anti-Plaxo passion comes from. Plaxo, in the past, was a very annoying viral product when virality was new and not well understood.

However, let us ask ourselves this: In the past two years how much have you been “annoyed” by Plaxo? How much have you been annoyed by another social network you are either part of? or not a part of?

@Michael Markman: Yeah, those names are so outdated. How about Networkr and SyncedIn. Those sort of names are SO much better.

Oops! I meant:

http://terrychay.com/blog/arti.....spam.shtml

Guess the birthday hangover is getting to me.

terry - eveyone has already unsubscribed from / blocked Plaxo, that’s why they’ve not been annoyed by them lately. Plaxo is NOT a social network. I don’t upload (or even allow access to) my cutomer’s or personal contacts’ home and cell #’s and daughter’s first name and whether they prefer sushi or when to send them an anniversary gift in my CRM, so what do I care if they are viral. Plaxo is a tool, and IS viral. Not a horrible tool, but definitely a suspicious one. Your comparison of Plaxo to social networking is apples to oranges b/c of the sensitivity of the data that Plaxo extracts and by default, has access to. What do I care if LinkedIn knows who’s in my “connections”? But I sure as heck care about Plaxo knowing who’s in my email contact list.

Amy,

I more than anyone say that Plaxo isn’t social networking. I like to say, “Use LinkedIn to build your business network; use Plaxo to maintain that network.” or s/LinkedIn/Facebook/ s/business/college/ (what have you).

But I was talking about VIRALITY: This step that is most annoying about this and where the “Plaxo is evil” statements directly come from. And in that sense all these companies are the same.

Have you joined a social network recently? I do as part of my job and every social network has importers where they spam your address list. For me, because of http://preview.plaxo.com/ , the sites they import from (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN) ALL contain the same information as my desktop address book.

Finally, LinkedIn has a tool that seems to be just that access to “just that” information you are talking about http://www.linkedin.com/static.....r_download . And since their connection network is far more prevalent among business users http://blog.beaufortes.com/200....._proj.html
and that connection network is PUBLIC (they are a social network after all) http://www.linkedin.com/in/tychay it is definitely more dangerous and less private.

The only difference here is that Plaxo legally binds themselves NOT to have access to those things you say and this binding forces them to NOT make that content public. Whereas the other social networks do not bind themselves and do make that content public.

I think there is a deeper problem here that we’re talking around. The problem is that Plaxo DOES maintain that YOU own your contact database and the problem with that ownership is it can’t be shared. What I mean is that the repal problem with Plaxo is that if I add Michael Arrington to my address book and sync that with Plaxo, Michael doesn’t have any control of that information nor is Plaxo empowered to do anything about that (because it’s my information, not Michael’s, but it is information OF Michael). In a simple sense that’s no different that a rolodex. But when you network up that rolodex… This needs to be addressed and discussed. We are having this discussion today and will have more in the future as social networking becomes more prevalent.

I won’t deny that. Nor will I defend it. I don’t even work at Plaxo anymore and I was just an engineer there when I did. There is a feeling that you don’t control things (even if it isn’t true) and that feeling is REAL. It leads people to justifiably gripe about Plaxo. It was the source of the huge blowup about Newsfeed and Facebook.

But to think that social networks aren’t doing the same as Plaxo (or worse) with YOUR contact information and YOUR contact network is either naïve or placing blind trust in incompetence.

Amy: Hi, another former employee of Plaxo here.
The difference between other social networks and plaxo is that the social networks actually own all of those messages between you, your daughter and their friends. Rather than just getting your contacts, they want to get your contacts/friends into their service. They want to own the communication medium entirely between you and your network. You will share your photos, messages/pokes, events and even relationship status on a Myspace, Facebook, or Bebo. All of the differences feature-wise come out of that difference. This has hurt Plaxo in the past because they relied on email more so than other networks.

Anyways, this news is interesting and the first I’ve heard about this Xing deal. Hopefully, we’ll get more info about that here.

Cheers!

plaxo is a nice backend utility and thats it. no one i know uses it actively, it sort of falls in the category of disk space backup. it missed the social network wave and its too late. ms, google or yahoo should suck it in for 100M while it still has enuf of a buff.

@Olly @terry chay

I have to belive that Plaxo really had to change their biz strategy at some point. I interviewed there several years ago and advanced (after 10 hours of interviews) to thier meet with their co-founders. After mock product meetings, programming tests, logic puzzles, actually working at someones workstation to fix 3 bugs…..I’m sitting in a conference room with the two founders. They ask me silly questions, like whether I like to play video games….finally they ask if I have any questions…..I bring up the ol’ “How will Plaxo make money? I’ve heard about this end-game, master plan, tell me more.”

The next few minutes changed my entire perspective of this company that seemingly had a vaulable service. They told me about how much it costs companies (newspapers, magazines, credit cards, insurance companies, etc, junk mailers of all kinds) to keep up with your address. That they pay for your address upwards of $1 a lead. They told me that with Plaxo, they know your address whenever it changes, they were the first to know and therefore could undercut other companies.

As someone who values their privacy I was shocked. Myspace, Facebook, etc… do not ask for your address (Facebook does but I don’t fill it in). Otherwise everyone is asking for your email address and I trust my spam filter to do a pretty good job of blocking that. But nothing is worse than 10 pieces of mail and 9 of them are junk. The Earth doesn’t need that kind of spam.

Anyhow, I believe that Plaxo has probably changed their business model after all the criticism they received, so this is all probably not a real issue anymore. Or maybe the founders were having fun with me, because they never offered me a job and probably didn’t want me to know the “master plan”. But either way, kind of shady if you ask me.

Plaxo is the pitts. I was getting 5-7 email messages a day from people I didn’t remember asking me to update my info. I went to the Plaxo Website, gave them all of my email addresses, opting out completely. I never want to be contacted again by anyone using this service. I can’t imagine this thing growing.

I was nervous about giving them all of my email addresses, but I had to take the chance. I’ve not been contacted since.

Market cap 200 million Euros.

http://uk.betastreaming.financ.....?s=O1BC.DE

Is Mike correct that this is a Chinese company (with German headquarters), or is it a German company?

Terry, I don’t really want to beat this to death, and i’m fine with Plaxo’s CURRENT vociferous defense of keeping my data private, but my concern is when they figure out they have no business or some investors want to recoup $ - that database is a potential goldmine. If your contacts show that you know Michael and that I know Michael and can find one or two other contacts that we share, this spider web of networking - knowledge is worth a lot of money.

I just don’t see the same issue with social networks, and don’t care if some dba there reads my “messages” or look at my photos or even relationship status. I do not upload sensitive data like personal notes, cell numbers, home addresses etc. to facebook, myspace etc. I very much care if Plaxo one decides to sell that database. Personally I would LOVE to get MY hands on that db. Pure gold.

@Dru- I believe this is actually being bashed around in the courts right now. They own the medium, i.e. the tools, for dispersing the data but the content that you actually type, and what you put up in your profile is yours (I’ve not read every social network’s terms of use but our lawyers have been following this point closely for my own company).

@amy
it’s like GMAIL ,they check the subjects of my mails ,and with some keywords they send me some ads .that’s diabolical.
The job of governements should makes some rules about, but in this time of war on terror ,we will wait a long time …and Google will continue to make billions for a long time…

That’s a rumour and there are no acutal plans for buying Plaxo, as Hinrich’s, CEO of openBC/XING, stated two hours ago at the shareholders’ meeting.

Just appeared in the press: It is not Plaxo but ZoomInfo.

… and just a cooperation, nothing more.

@Bill / #27: it’s a german company (headquarters in Hamburg) with its own chinese subsidiary for the chinese market

Man - I hated Plaxo to begin with, now they are going to be owned by a german company! You cant even search your contacts in Plaxo. I migrated my Plaxo contacts to spock.com…totally cool application. much better for staying in touch with your network then plaxo..

bill - in the new version of plaxo.com you can search http://preview.plaxo.com

@bill: As I stated before, that’s a rumour and has been denied by the CEO.

Heard Zoominfo is actually the fastest growing people database so makes sense for them to add social networking with a deep partnership with XING