Comcast Has a Better Eye than CBS

By Carl Ford

While the world was complaining about the CBS purchase of CNET for $1.8 billion Comcast bought Plaxo for $150 million. This is probably the best purchase yet in social networking.

For those who have not been following the controversy between Rob Scoble and Facebook; Rob Scoble decided to part ways with Facebook for a variety of reasons and wanted to stay connected to his community. Given Rob's presence in the blogosphere when he gets upset, it can form a ground swell of support.  So Plaxo enabled a functioning (but not ideal) tool for exporting out of Facebook into Plaxo's Pulse social network. Facebook cried foul and blocked the application. Rob ended up with more support and an offshoot has been the formation of the data portability forum.

The Data Portability Forum has become frenzied with activity and, thanks to folks like Phil Wolfe and others, I expect it to yield some good strategies.  (Although I am not sure I would use all of them.) The forum is probably going to yield some agreements in formats and may be a good place to think about your own social network strategies.

From my perspective Plaxo stands to gain a lot from the controversy and the formation. I cannot describe Pulse well.  It feels like everyone is posting to a common wall, but I am sure given the two million end users on Plaxo there is some discernment about "my" network. But the point is that Pulse has found a high ground in a world of social hysteria.

So what made Plaxo sell for $150 million now? After all, Facebook and MySpace are valued far higher. Could it be because of the Millenials? After all, I have been using Plaxo for at least four years. It has legitimately about 2,500 of my names (it claimed I had 10,000 but the dedupe killed off a 4-to-1 problem I had in Outlook).  If I am part of the demographics so, probably, is the Lawrence Welk fan club.

We can take at face value Comcast (the buyers) investing in the growth opportunity, and the sellers probably have lots of ideas what they can do with the money. But in these days of widgets, is the money that important for development? What about for marketing? Where would you place the money? 

And, as the buyer, what is the benefit to Comcast in buying into a still-to-be-separate social network. 

Don't get me wrong, I can make a case. Comcast has embraced end-user video and one thing that Plaxo can be is a Personal Video Answering machine. It can also be used to build communities around Comcast content. Last year at this time, Comcast integrated Plaxo into their portal for Voice customers. Given the fact that no press release about the acquisition is on the Comcast side, maybe the cost of buying Plaxo was a wash given the payment for the services to their customers.

Meanwhile, imho its clear Comcast has a lively Pulse in Plaxo.

Carl Ford is Strategic Advisor and Community Developer for FierceMarkets. His words of wisdom can be found at www.carlford.net.