There must be something in the water this week. While the biggest new media acquisition story of the day has to be CBS buying CNET for $1.8 billion, big companies are swallowing up smaller ones left and right. Media company Comcast is buying social networking site Plaxo for something like $150 million, while Ask.com is shelling out an undisclosed sum for Lexico, the company that runs Dictionary.com.

While there's been a lot of speculation recently that someone was going to buy Plaxo, Comcast wasn't the first company that sprung to mind. We figured a company that already has ties to the social networking space like Google or Facebook would have made more sense. In a blog post on the subject, Plaxo CEO Ben Golub says Comcast has plans to "bring the social media experience to mainstream consumers." That means using Plaxo's technology to connect with your contacts across multiple devices. And since Comcast is already in the TV, phone, and ISP business, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. Perhaps your TV viewing habits will automatically be added to your social networking profile? Yeah, we hope not.

The Ask.com/Lexico deal seems like a more natural fit. We doubt Lexico's popular web sites like Dictionary.com will disappear. Rather, Ask will be able to increase its overall web traffic by bringing the new sites into the fold.

For the average web user, Friend Connect means you're going to see social data cropping up on a whole bunch of websites that never included social networks before. You'll basically be able to plug in your information from any of the participating networks where you have a profile, and then you can interact with other users of the site who do the same. It's basically like a mini-Facebook built into any site.

What does this mean for site owners? Well, Google is promising to make setting up Friend Connect on your site ridiculously easy -- which is why we think you're going to start seeing it everywhere on the web. It basically generates the entire code for you, to be pasted into your existing site. If you're interested in trying it out, you can apply to Google now.

HelloTxt makes it easy to make sure all of your friends know what you're up to all the time, no matter what social networking services they use. Actually, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but HelloTxt does let you post messages simultaneously to a whole slew of social networking sites that allow you to frequently update your status.

You don't need to register for an account to use HelloTxt, but as you've probably guessed, you do need to enter your login information for your various social networking sites. If you do register for an account, you only have to enter this data once, and then you can broadcast your updates to your hearts content. Registered users can also see a timeline with your latest updates and responses from their friends.

[via makeuseof]

In the wake of last week's explosion of attention on data portability on social networks, (that is, being able to take your data from one social network to the other) there is a huge development today. Google, Facebook, and Plaxo have all announced they're joining DataPortability.org.

What does this mean? Well to quote the announcement directly, "Users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems". Potentially it means social network widget and application creators will be able to write their widgets for use on any compatible social network.

Considering all these social networks are fighting for our attention, we are not sure how 'open' these social graphs will truly be. Will we be able to export our friends list from Facebook and take it over to MySpace and vice versa? Might we be able to take Facebook applications and use them in MySpace?

These are the types of questions that still need to be answered. Stay tuned to Download Squad for updates as they come across the wire.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Looking for a good way to synchronize data between your Google Calendar, iCal on your Mac at home and Outlook on your desktop? Plaxo offers an online calendar, contact solution that lets you synchronize across multiple clients. And now the company has launched a Windows Mobile synchronization client, which if you ask us is kind of the holy grail of data synchronization. Theoretically, this allows you to update your information using your phone, computer, or pretty much any internet connected device capable of accessing Plaxo, Google Calendar, or whatever site you use to enter upcoming appointments.

The only problem we've run into is that Plaxo for Windows Mobile is not compatible with older Windows Mobile 2003 devices. Windows Mobile sync is only available for Plaxo Premium customers, so it will set you back $50 a year. But there's a 30 day free trial if you just want to check the service out.

[via VentureBeat]

Microsoft became the market leader in operating system deployment largely by making its OS and software available to any hardware maker that wanted to license the technology. Apple, on the other hand, has always insisted the its OS should only run on Apple-labeled computers. So while Microsoft is often slammed for not being "open," the company owes much of what it is to early openness.

And it looks like Microsoft arch rival Google may be playing the same card when it comes to social networking. The company's OpenSocial social networking platform allows third party companies to partner with Google. While Facebook opened up its API earlier this year, allowing third parties to create applications, Google has attracted some major players, including MySpace, Six Apart, and Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5. That's sort of the equivalent of getting IBM and HP on your side.

But here's what makes OpenSocial different. You'll notice that some of the big names in there are other social networks. That's because OpenSocial is a platform, not a website. MySpace, Friendster, and other social networks partnering with Google will use OpenSocial APIs, meaning if you develop an application for one site it will function on all the other sites.

In other words, OpenSocial isn't a social networking site. It's a common set of APIs that will be used by social networking sites -- and Google is behind the initiative, which gives them the same kind of status here that Microsoft had in the early days of desktop operating systems. You know, if you think desktop OSes and social networks are comparable, which they're probably not.

How many social networks do we need? With 15 million registered users, Plaxo thinks there is definitely room for another.

Plaxo is rumored to be opening its doors to a whole new social network on Monday called Pulse. We've covered Plaxo quite often in the past, but if you have never used it: the service is an online contact management tool and calendar that organizes and stores all information online, with syncing capabilities. The company is said to be working to be an open social network by displaying contacts feeds of activities online, from photos, wish lists, playlists, profiles and blog posts. We will have to wait until Monday to see if its a serious front runner to Facebook, and LinkedIn. Stay tuned.

DLS readers, are you ready for a shiny new social network?

Well that didn't take long; apparently Plaxo was planning to launch their public beta a bit sooner than we thought. Whereby 'sooner' we mean 'right now'; the company has just opened the Plaxo 3.0 doors to a public beta for one and all to sign up. Still offering most services as free, Plaxo is inarguably positioning themselves as the incontestable leader of synchronizing not only your own contacts and calendars, but also the information your contacts change in their own address books.

If you aren't up for trying out the 3.0 beta, perhaps a demo video and brief review from the omni-present Robert Scoble will give you enough information to help you lean towards one side of the fence or the other. Scoble has some of the same great things to say about Plaxo as we did, though he's running into some sluggish and flaky synching quirks (hence the all-too-disclaimer-ing beta badge). Nevertheless, it's clear that Plaxo has a great thing going, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look soon.

For about a month now, the kind folks at Plaxo have allowed us to play with the beta of Plaxo 3.0, a major update to their unique service that takes the 'management' out of desktop + online PIM. As if the present version's ability to synchronize your contact and calendar information between Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and some online services wasn't enough, Plaxo's ability to automatically update your address book whenever a fellow Plaxo user changes their information was a pretty unique feature that really let the company's vision shine. After playing with this new beta, however, we feel comfortable saying that Plaxo 3.0 could very well be nothing short of revolutionary to world of data management and synchronization.

While the Plaxo folk understandably won't allow us to spill too many details, we can at least give you a general overview of what all the fuss is about. The most significant change in this upcoming version is the addition of some major new 'sync points,' which are applications and web services Plaxo can synchronize with, impressively spanning the entire digital globe of OSes and web brands. In our screenshot above you see five points: Plaxo (of course), Google (yep: Gmail and, soon to come, Calendar), Windows Mail in Vista, Mac OS X's Address Book and iCal and even Yahoo!'s Address Book and (soon to come) calendar. Another major new sync point (requiring a paid Plaxo account) is LInkedIn, allowing users access the increasingly popular social network based on who has worked with who. Never before have we seen so much synchronizing power built in such a smart and streamlined tool. Amazingly, a lot of this new functionality will still apparently be provided for free, with a few select sync points and the rest of Plaxo's services (such as e-cards, Address Book recovery, storing more than 1000 contacts and 24-7 support) being made available to paid accounts.

Other new features in the Plaxo 3.0 beta reveal a new 'dashboard for your life' aspect to the service, which is also pulled off pretty well. Some of the online tools allow you to view basic things like the week's weather, while others allow you to easily watch RSS feeds for Flickr photos, friends' Amazon wishlists and blogs.

That's about all we should talk about for now, however, but stay tuned for a full review and screenshot gallery as soon as we can schmooze the Plaxo guys into greenlighting them. In the meantime, if you're already a current Plaxo user or we have just piqued your interest, we recommend cleaning up your address book and finally getting into the habit of actually jotting down your week's appointments and todos in Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or any of the other services Plaxo will help you synchronize. This way, if you do it once, the new Plaxo should ensure you might never have to again.

So last week when I posted Plaxo dials the phone for you, I didn't realize that the JAJAH-powered service is actually available Plaxo-free, in the form of a web service or Firefox extension. In case you missed the Plaxo post, what JAJAH does when you enter a friend's telephone number is call your phone, then when you pick up, dial their phone number. This would be unremarkable except for the fact that through the power of VoIP, JAJAH will cost you a fraction of what a normal long-distance or international call would. For example, long-distance calls within the U.S. cost less than two cents per minute, and a call from the U.S. to Japan costs a little more than three cents per minute. That ain't bad, and is decidedly more simple to set up (and explain to your grandmother) than, say, Skype. At the JAJAH web site you can get a free five-minute trial without having to sign up for anything and Mozilla Update has the extension that adds JAJAH to your Firefox search box.

CNet is running an interesting story titled Plaxo gets hip to VoIP about a new service from the Grand Unified Address Book company that takes the computer out of VoIP. Basically it works like this: You click on a friend's phone number in your Plaxo address book and immediately Plaxo calls you. As soon as you answer, it dials your friend and connects you. You know, just like a regular phone call, except that you don't have to press all those pesky buttons. Okay, so aside from being handy for the uber-lazy, there is a twist: The first five minutes of your call are free, and after that you pay less than two cents per minute in the U.S., or slightly more for international calls. This, I'll admit, isn't half bad: You get most of the savings of VoIP with none of the headset-wrangling. Sounds perfect for the grandma who's just figuring out web browsers but would give up at the sight of something like Skype.