Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found out today, Eric got his data feed.

What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >>

A subset of the Gillmor Gang met via telephone this afternoon to debate the $150 - $170 million Comcast acquisition of Plaxo. Listen to Steve Gillmor, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and me talk about whether this was a smart move for Comcast, or a sucker’s purchase of a company no one in Silicon Valley would touch.

Listen here.

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.

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.

We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).

Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.

Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.

More details as they come in.

This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday - listen to here.

We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.
Read More

Okay, making Plaxo look lame isn’t that hard. But as Plaxo has been groping around the past year trying to turn itself into a social network to attract a buyer (cough, Comcast), a little startup in the Netherlands called Soocial has been building a kick-ass contact management service that syncs all of your contacts between your desktop, cell phone, and a growing list of Web services. This company won one of the vote-in demo spots at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam (CEO Stefan Fountain pictured above), and their video demo featuring David Hasselhoff (shown below) stole the show. TechCrunch has 300 invites to the beta that you can grab here.

Soocial is not yet everything it could be, but it has a lot of potential, and its approach to syncing contacts is the right one. Right now, it supports an impressive 400 phones, contacts in Gmail, 37Signals’ Highrise CRM app, and contacts in your Mac address book on your desktop. (You gotta love a startup whose beta software works only on a Mac.) Support for Outllook on Windows machines is coming soon, as is syncing with LinkedIn, and contacts in Windows Live and Yahoo.

With all of these services and devices, if you add a contact in one, it updates your contact list and details everywhere else. This two-way syncing is what is really impressive. It even works with the iPhone, although only by syncing through iTunes on the desktop. Soocial also has a lame Facebook app, because Facebook does not allow syncing of contacts yet.

As more services open up with data portability and open APIs, Soocial will add them as well. All Soocial wants to do is sync your contacts no matter where you keep them. It is not trying to be a social network, and it is not trying to grow by spamming its users friends. “Not everybody has friends, but everybody has contacts,” says Fountain.

The startup is based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and has raised 300,000 Euros from angel investors. It was founded in November, 2006. The business model is unclear, but the founders hope to be able to charge subscriptions to power users. Enjoy the video:

Hassle Free from Soocial on Vimeo.

(Photo by Anne Helmond)

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.

Facebook is planning on allowing users to add activities from third party social networking site directly into their Facebook news feed, we’ve confirmed. The goal is to centralize all that activity in one place.

Third parties can already integrate directly today via the Facebook API, Beacon and the Facebook Platform, but adoption from these companies, which are indirectly also competing with Facebook, has been slow. Now, users can add the content stream directly. Users simply tell Facebook what third party services they use the most, along with their credentials or public feed for the site. The content stream is then pulled into your Facebook News Feed.

What this means: in your friends news feed, you may start to see more content from Flickr, Twitter, Digg and other third party services. This competes directly with what a number of startups are doing - namely FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and the more recently launched Iminta.

This is certainly an opening up of Facebook. And given that so many tens of millions of users spend so much time on the site already, it could remove the wind from the FriendFeed/Plaxo sails.

But don’t expect to see a RSS feed or widgets showing what you or your friends are up to any time soon. The data feeds that Facebook opened up last year do not extend to the News Feed. And from what we hear, Facebook hasn’t made a decision to open it up yet. Until they do, there is still plenty of breathing room for competitors.

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).

San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

There are other services that are very similar - FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) - I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends - we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

In the words of one Silicon Valley insider that I spoke with today, “Plaxo has been desperately, desperately, desperately trying to sell” for quite some time. Late last year they got serious and hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, to help move things along.

The rumor mill really got going when Revolution Partners started making their calls and sending out the company’s financial information to potential buyers. A rumor about a Facebook acquisition turned out to be false. Now Wired is reporting that Google may be doing the deal, for $200 million. Writer Megan McCarthy says she’s 100% sure a deal has been done, and thinks Google is the most likely buyer.

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).

Did Google buy them? The two companies are certainly friendly. Plaxo has been a big supporter of Google Open Social from the start, and has consistently adopted new Google social products. And Google’s new Social Graph API gels nicely with what Plaxo has done with Pulse.

More as this develops, if it does.

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.

At some point last year people started to realize that the email inbox was not only the “original” Internet social network, it’s also going to be the backbone of social networking going forward. You already have your friends (people in your address book), and the social graph is already filled (people you email, and who they email, etc.).

Yahoo is clearly focused on this, for example. And In December Plaxo bolted their social network, Pulse, onto Outlook. Now you could see what a friend was up to just before emailing them. Today they are rolling out the same functionality for the Mac Address Book.

Users must download a plugin that acts as a bridge between Mac’s sync services and your Plaxo account. This also sync’s your Mac address book with your Plaxo address book. In addition to basic contact data, Pulse will pull in recent friend actions on social networks (blogs, Digg, Twitter, delicious, Flickr, Yelp, etc.).

If you are a Pulse member, download the Mac client here.

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.

Joining the cavalcade of companies jumping on the open data bandwagon, LinkedIn has now joined Facebook, Google, Plaxo (announcement here) in joining the DataPortability Work Group.

LinkedIn has worked hard to become open since announcing their own open platform in June 2007 in response to Facebook, then becoming an initial OpenSocial launch partner in October 2007.

I spoke to the DataPortability Work Group head Chris Saad prior to the announcement and he told me that he was happy to see another leading social networking site join the group. Since the big announcement Tuesday he’s had a number of other approaches from leading sites to join the group, companies he wouldn’t name to me who might join in the coming days. It was only January 6 when we wrote the words “ultimately supporting open access to data is a positive thing…as social networking further matures in 2008, open access is a cause that may well find favor.” Little did we know then that there would be an almighty rush of companies signing up to work for open standards and data portability with the next four days. As much as it pains me on some levels to say this, thanks Robert Scoble, your Gandhi-esque resistance was the tipping point.

Update: Web developers from Flickr, SixApart, and Twitter have also joined.

After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.

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.