Since we reported yesterday that cable and Internet provider Comcast had acquired social address book Plaxo for an estimated $150 million, we've been fielding a lot of comments and emails -- most of them not very supportive of the acquisition. Most people seem wary of Comcast -- which has a poor reputation on the web due to "bandwidth throttling" practices -- and some have told us that they'll be deleting their Plaxo accounts. How about you?

We noted yesterday that Plaxo's early reputation was that of "one of the biggest scum-bags of the mainstream social web," and Comcast has an even more tarnished reputation. Recently, Plaxo had started to soften that poor reputation in some circles, but selling to Comcast may have set them back to square one. "Given the histories of both companies, something devious is liable to happen," we predicted, and many of our readers agreed. But we're curious, with Comcast at the helm, will you stop using Plaxo? Let us know in the poll below and add your opinions in the comments.

Now that Comcast has acquired Plaxo, will you still use the service?
( polls)

This guest post was contributed by Bernard Moon, who authors the blog Silicon Moon.

When the sitcom “30 Rock” began its run, some of my friends weren’t wild about Tina Fey, the show’s star and creator, saying she should “stay in the writer’s room” or that she “looked too mousy.” A few months later, however, those same guys were talking about how hot she was. Fey has since become a mainstream darling. Twitter is Web 2.0’s Tina Fey. Not so attractive initially, Twitter got better the more you looked at it. Case in point: Although I tested Twitter as soon as it launched, I eventually ended up sitting on my account because I wasn’t enamored by early adopters and Silicon Valley geeks listening to each other talk. Today, that situation has changed: While the echo chamber still exists, Twitter seems to be reaching a critical mass that will push it into the mainstream.

An obvious target group for Twitter is the youth and SMS (Short Message Service) markets. The reason for this is that micro-blogging services (such as Twitter, Pownce, and Zannel) provide an easy alternative for blasting messages to multiple contacts, and teens are prolific SMS users. Although wireless carriers in Korea have provided an online platform for broadcasting SMS messages through mobile phones since early 2000—a service favored by night club owners and party planners—I find it highly doubtful that U.S. carriers will be able to do the same (in the process creating a viable competitor to Twitter and others) since they’ve stumbled so many times before in the past (acquisition is a reasonable possibility). Since in addition to their SMS activities, many high school kids are becoming “wall” crazy on Facebook, I assume micro-blogging services could keep more of them glued to their mobile devices.

As Twitter and services like it move into the mainstream, I see a few trends emerging. One is the implementation of increased structure within these platforms. This will be related to better discovery of information ranging from simple things as tags to third-party search engines. Additional infrastructure will also be created to allow people to join larger conversations and to extend the focus of such services beyond today’s echo chamber. Since we’re dealing with a broadcast medium, you could call these broader conversations “channels.” Pownce, for example, allows groups, but I’m thinking about completely open channels for everyone on a platform (or meshed platform, if that ever happens)—for example, national public channels on marketing ideas, baby channels, a Red Sox Nation channel, even a Suze Orman channel. While short-form blogging doesn’t fulfill every need, it can be an excellent venue for brainstorming, generating new ideas, and creating an insightful medium that goes beyond mere ego-tracking.

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In the past 24 hours, two major deals have gone down: Comcast acquired Plaxo for a reported $175 million, while CBS scooped up CNET this morning for $1.8 billion. On the surface, neither pairing makes a whole lot of sense – a big cable company buying an online address book manager, and the home of “CSI: Miami” purchasing the Web’s most popular technology news conglomerate.

Here’s how executives involved in the dealings defended the pairings:

Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo:

“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. This is also great news for the Internet industry at large, where Plaxo has been – and will continue to be – a strong advocate for opening up the Social Web.”

Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS:

“Together, CBS and CNET Networks will have significant additional exposure to the fastest- growing advertising sector and can accelerate our growth through a number of new content, promotion and advertising initiatives.”

Do these deals make sense to you, or do you think we are the tail end of another bubble, with old media scrambling to buy the remaining big, independent web properties? More aptly, which of these two deals do you think makes the most sense? Sound off in our poll:

Which deal do you think makes the most sense?
• CBS-CNET
• Comcast-Plaxo
View Results

mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/internet-mergers/

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Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Screen grabs chronicles the uses (and misuses) of real-world gadgets in today's movies and TV. Send in your sightings (with screen grab!) to screengrabs at engadget dt com.

Though we're breaking slightly from our typical Screen Grabs format (movies, TV), we could never live with ourselves if we didn't share these shocking gadget appearances from Metal Gear Solid 4. That's right, despite being on some kind of deadly spy mission, Solid Snake will find time to bro down with a fifth-generation iPod (above), while some lovely cohort of his dials up for pizza on a Sony Ericsson W62S clamshell. More pics after the break.

[Via iLounge / CellPassion]

Continue reading Screen Grabs: Metal Gear Solid 4 gets iPod and Sony Ericsson product placement

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We received this internal memo to AT&T employees describing a failed launch today of AT&T’s WiFi service. From the memo:

“The iPhone Wi-Fi offer that was scheduled to launch today has been canceled. Nothing has been announced by the company to our customers and will not impact existing customers. Additional communication will be provided if the status the project changes.”

This appears to be the same service we spotted at Starbucks ten days ago. This could be a move to make pre-3G iPhone users feel less left out in the bandwidth department, but also let’s hope they have a strong upgrade path for existing users.

Read our full AT&T Wi-Fi coverage here.

Copenda, the people search engine that scours social networks and dating sites to help you find your true love, has undergone a number of changes that would pretty much qualify this as a relaunch of the site.

Great Redesign of User Interface

For starters, the user interface has been redesigned. I know this is a typical modification for relaunches, but I must admit that Copenda’s new design makes it far easier to use and much more attractive. One complaint I had about Copenda’s design upon its launch was the fact that the search results resembled a table to be dissected instead of an easily consumed set of matches to consider.

Improved Filter Options

Another new feature that goes hand in hand with this particular design update is the new filter option–something else I wanted to see added to the site. As there is so much data to sift through with Copenda searching across so many networks, filtering through the search results is key for the user experience. It helps rectify one of the major issues I had with Copenda’s initial search tool, which could offer you pages of search results based on gender alone, which doesn’t really narrow down search to a great extent.

More Control for Users

The individual user experience has been improved in a couple of other ways, with more control being extended to users for the display of their Copenda profiles, as well as the option to contact users through the social network with which they’re associated.

Search API

Another important update is the provision of a Search API, which includes mobile support. So other networks and applications can leverage Copenda’s niche people search for various use cases.

In all, Copenda is beginning to look a lot more like your average people search, just targeted towards finding people for dating purposes. I think this is the best route to go for such a search tool, as it allows for a lot of growth in multiple directions, including personalized feed updates, profile agregation, and a unique set of data that could prove useful to advertisers.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/copenda-relaunc/

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Flickr’d

The Guardian speculates that Sony could be losing as much as $260 per PS3 sold, significantly higher than the $130 per PS3 to which Sony recently admitted. Care? Maybe you should.

If Sony continues to lose that much per system sold—either $130 or $260 or some other out-of-thin-air estimate—what are the odds that it’ll lower the price?

Right now, the cheapest PS3, the 40GB SKU, costs $400. Should the above numbers hold, you’re probably looking at that $400 price tag for still some time.

Again, this is all wild, “let me crunch the numbers because I have an hour to kill before I leave the office” speculation, so tread lightly.

Filed under: Wireless, Networking

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Last month we wrote about how New York was changing a law to try to force Amazon to collect and pay sales tax in New York by defining any affiliate in the state as being an Amazon point of presence. This is a clear perversion of the intention of the law that only requires collecting sales tax if the company has a physical presence in the state. While Amazon is now fighting this law in court, others are taking more drastic measures. E-commerce site Overstock.com has declared that it will no longer allow New York affiliates in order to avoid having the state consider it to have a "physical presence" there. This would be an unintended consequence of such a law. In an effort to get e-commerce providers to cough up more in taxes, not only will Overstock not be paying those taxes, it just made life a lot more difficult for thousands of Overstock affiliates in New York.

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Update: More details here.

Facebook is all about openness and data portability, as long as that doesn’t involve openness or portability of data, it seems.

Today they wrote a long 7 paragraph blog post to get a single point across: Facebook has banned Google’s Friend Connect access to the Facebook API:

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

This of course has nothing to do with the fact that Facebook launched their own nearly identically named product called Facebook Connect three days before Google’s Friend Connect.

It’s not clear exactly what features of Friend Connect justified the ban, since it is so similar to what Facebook announced on Friday. Both products allow the export of profile and friend list data to third party websites.

In the last paragraph of the blog post, Facebook says they want to work with everyone: “We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.” If that’s the case, this sure is an interesting start to a healthy working relationship with Google. Next up on the block list: MySpace and their Data Availability malware product, no doubt.

Thanks for the tip, Jesse.

Update: Facebook PR is pointing out Sections 2B(4), 2B(5) and 2A9(vi) of the Developer Terms of Service:

4) You may not store any Facebook Properties in any Data Repository which enables any third party (other than the Applicable Facebook User for such Facebook Properties) to access or share the Facebook Properties without our prior written consent.

5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.

You will not use Facebook Platform or any of your Facebook Platform Applications, and your Facebook Platform Application will not be designed…(vi) to request, collect, solicit or otherwise obtain access to usernames, passwords or other authentication credentials from any Facebook Users, or to proxy authentication credentials for any Facebook Users for the purposes of automating logins to the Facebook Site.

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