Check out AT&T's FREE camera phones
February 7, 2008 4:10 PM PST
Google to buy Plaxo? $200 million worth of data
Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.
I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.
Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can interweave into its other services.
Data that could be used to map out a wide-ranging social graph.
Valleywag pegs the number to be paid at $200 million. For that data, I'd pay a lot more.
Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
- Topics:
-
Rumors and Gossip,
-
Google
- Tags:
-
Valleywag,
-
data,
-
Tim O'Reilly,
-
Google,
-
Plaxo
- Bookmark:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
