Sean Parker has had a hand in some of the Valley's biggest successes. His first company, Napster, took the world by storm, but didn't make Parker rich. His second, Plaxo, just sold to Comcast. And his third, Facebook — well, say no more. Except for the bit about him getting kicked out, according to Mark Zuckerberg's…

Months after rumors of its interest first surfaced, Comcast has officially bought Plaxo. Terms weren't disclosed, but we last heard that the price was rumored to be around $175 million. For now, Comcast is keeping Plaxo and its engineering team in place in Mountain View, giving the cable company a toehold in Silicon…

Comcast reported a 54 percent jump in fourth quarter profits due primarily to increased customer spending and added revenues from acquired companies. Comcast also announced a dividend of 6.25 cents per share for the quarter and said it plans to spend $6.9 billion on share buybacks before 2010.
"We are not spending any…

We keep hearing Plaxo has signed a deal to sell the company. But is the buyer Google — where engineer Brad Fitzpatrick is buddy-buddy with Plaxo's Joseph Smarr? Or is it Comcast? The latter. Comcast, we're told, has bought Plaxo for $175 million in cash. While Plaxo has tried to reinvent itself as a social network,…

Is Plaxo going to Google, as some rumors have it? Possibly. We hear Joe Kraus, a Google executive knee-deep in its effort to catch up in social networking, skipped the company trip to Disneyland this week so he could finish a deal. But other insiders say Google's not doing a deal with Plaxo. Another plausible bidder:…

Plaxo, the contact-sharing service trying to reinvent itself as a social network, may have sold itself to Google for something close to $200 million. And if the rumor's true, I think the companies may be doing it out of friendship. One could bloviate endlessly here about industry consolidation, user-data portability,…

Joseph Smarr is Plaxo's chief platform architect and one of the data-portability Share Bears. He just wants you to be able to snuggle your friends from one website to the next. How sweet! Smarr gave a speech on the subject at this weekend's Foo Camp nerdfest. I'd do a 100-word version of it, but I just can't keep…

Caring is sharing, people, especially when it comes to your personal data. Leading developers from important social-network sites joining a "data-portability" advocacy group doesn't represent history in the making. It's a marketing campaign to make everyone feel sickly sweet, knowing that these websites are so…

Did Plaxo exploit blogger Robert Scoble by cajoling him into breaking Facebook's terms of service to test a new feature, temporarily getting his account suspended? Plaxo executive John McCrea would prefer you didn't think so. "Biggest regret? A lot of folks saying/thinking we took advantage of you. Bummer," McCrea …

Facebook quickly reversed its decision to ban egoblogger Robert Scoble. He promised not to repeat the stunt of scraping their site for information about his friends. Facebook, for its part, said that the banning was the result of an automated process — but it's unlikely to give up its data without similar fights.…

Illustrious egoblogger Robert Scoble, the Paris Hilton of Silicon Valley, has committed the geek equivalent of a DUI. He has, by his own admission, violated Facebook's terms of service, and had his account suspended — 5,000 friends and all. Scoble's sin? He used a script to export his Facebook address-book information…

The New York Times reports that address-book service Plaxo is seeking up to $100 million from buyers. Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin writes, "Plaxo, which has been overtaken by rivals like LinkedIn and Facebook, has tried to reinvent itself as an aggregate of information from other social networking sites," joining…

Apparently someone told Joseph Smarr, Plaxo's chief platform architect, that he's a "rock star." Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. They were referring to your programming skills. Smarr does have the rock-and-roll look down, if not the sound. Here's a pic of him striking a hot pose.

There was a rumor floating around last year that Valley bad boy Sean Parker was forced out of startup Plaxo for a cocaine arrest. Turns out that rumor wasn't exactly true. According to a transcription of Mark Zuckerberg's deposition from the ConnectU v. Facebook case, it was Facebook, not Plaxo, which dropped Peter…

Call Google's OpenSocial intiative a PR scam if you want. Executives from social network Plaxo don't care — because for them, it was a successful PR scam. Take a look at the chart they provided CNET. Since Google announced its "open" alternative to Facebook's developer platform and included Plaxo as a launch partner,…

According to a source, blog-software company Six Apart has joined as another partner for Google's OpenSocial platform. For those of you keeping count at home, don't bother. The list is surely to grow as word gets out. Social network Friendster, for example, wasn't asked to join the Google Gang. The pioneering social…

Google couldn't get a piece of Facebook or its hot apps platform, so now it's building its own. Not that it would like people to call it Google's platform; it's trying to persuade people that this is an open platform. It's called OpenSocial, and it's supposed to force developers to reconsider writing apps solely in…