Plaxo looks to social networking market
Online address book provider Plaxo has introduced a major overhaul in an effort to catch up with networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. — Plaxo has released Plaxo 3.0, an online address book and calendar that synchronises services from Microsoft …
Context & Ripple Effects
Plaxo's reboot lands two weeks after TechCrunch reported Xing may be in talks to acquire the company, so the release reads as both product statement and negotiating position: an address-book utility repositioning itself as a social networking contender against LinkedIn and Facebook. The same-day Download Squad walkthrough frames Plaxo 3.0 as the most serious attempt yet to fuse web and desktop personal information management.
The strategic core is synchronisation: by syncing Microsoft services alongside its own address book and calendar, Plaxo is betting that whoever aggregates a user's contacts across web and desktop owns the raw material of a social network. Pickup was solid but modest — GigaOM and Plaxo's own announcement card covered it — suggesting the market still sees Plaxo as a challenger rather than an incumbent.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn and Facebook face a competitor whose wedge is not profiles or feeds but the synced contact data users already maintain, lowering the cost of switching for professionals who live in Outlook.
- Plaxo's reliance on Microsoft service synchronisation makes Redmond a gatekeeper for the feature the entire repositioning depends on.
Second-order effects
- If Xing's reported acquisition interest has substance, a credible 3.0 gives Plaxo leverage in those talks or invites other suitors who want the aggregated contact graph rather than the address book itself.
- LinkedIn in particular must decide whether to match calendar-and-contact synchronisation — features adjacent to its professional-graph core — or cede the desktop-integration layer to Plaxo.
Third-order effects
- The release points toward personal information management and social networking converging into one contest over the contact graph, where the durable asset is the synced relationship data rather than any single app.
- If sync-based challengers gain traction, social platforms' defences shift from network effects alone toward lock-in through interoperability with desktop incumbents like Microsoft.
The trend: Contact and calendar data are being repositioned from a syncing utility into the substrate of social networking, with address-book providers racing platform companies for ownership of the professional graph.