• VentureBeat, Thursday, May 15, 2008 11:45 AM

Plaxo has finally sold itself, after months of rumors, but not to Google or Facebook. Rather surprisingly (err, curiously) Comcast Corp. has swooped in to acquire the social address book organizer. VentureBeat points out that Comcast and Plaxo already had an existing partnership, so the cable distributor must have thought the time was right to take the relationship to the next step. But VB said that Plaxo didn't come cheap, costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 to $170 million.

Plaxo's technology allows users to sync their contacts across email applications. Last year, the company added a new Facebook-esque service called "Pulse" that functions in a similar manner to Facebook's News Feed, except that it tracks friends' activities on sites across the Web. For example, if one of your contacts uploads a photo to Flickr, that person's photos might appear in your Pulse stream. "As anyone who covers social media has seen, these feeds are all the rage nowadays," said VB writer MG Siegler.

It's unclear how Comcast, which provides Internet service, will integrate Plaxo. In its press release, the company said it "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."

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