Plaxo torn between two lovers?
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: Comcast.
The cable giant has been an active buyer of startups recently, and Plaxo already runs its online address book. Whoever buys Plaxo is likely to be after its engineers and its Pulse social network, not its legacy address-synching business. That's what we hear drew Facebook's interest. But Facebook has, as far as we can tell, dropped out of the bidding for Plaxo.
Facebook's cash is reserved for a massive datacenter expansion. And a stock deal would bring Sequoia Capital into Facebook as an investor. We hear Sequoia is keen on that prospect. Facebook's investors — a group which includes Plaxo founder Sean Parker, whom Sequoia forced out of the company — are not as sanguine about such a scenario.