Plaxo

» see plaxo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

plaxo launched in november 2002 from a small office in mountain view. the founding team was sean parker, fresh off the napster collapse, with two stanford engineering students named todd masonis and cameron ring. the pitch was a clean engineering problem dressed up as a consumer product. address books were going stale all the time because nobody updated their contacts when someone moved or changed jobs. plaxo would synchronize them. you installed the plaxo client into outlook and it scanned your contacts into the cloud. any time one of your plaxo-connected friends updated their phone number it propagated into your address book automatically.

the part that worked too well was the bootstrapping email. when you signed up, plaxo would offer to mail every contact in your address book and ask them to fill in their own card. millions of people received those mails over the next two years. they looked like they came from a friend asking for personal contact details, and the senders often did not realize plaxo had sent them on their behalf. by late 2003 the service had a reputation problem that took it about three years to outlive. it kept growing through it. by july 2008 it claimed roughly 20 million users.

the first time i heard of plaxo was through the inbox. someone in a mailing list i was on signed up and the request landed in my inbox asking me to fill out a contact card for them. it had the same energy as the friendster invite emails that were starting to land around the same period, except with no social network behind it. i did not click. nobody i knew in turkey ran their address book through plaxo. the contact stack here was msn and sim cards. facebook came later. plaxo solved an american white-collar problem that did not have a turkish equivalent.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the actual product underneath the spam was useful. an outlook plugin and a web view that let you see one merged version of your address book across multiple accounts. early lifehacker readers loved it. the engineering team kept ahead of the privacy backlash by adding throttling on bulk invites and an opt-out registry that pre-emptively excluded addresses. by 2007 plaxo pulse arrived as a social-network layer on top of the address book, where you could see friends' status updates in the same place you tracked their phone numbers.

on 14 may 2008 comcast announced it was buying plaxo. the deal closed on 1 july 2008. terms were never disclosed, with most outlets putting the price between $150m and $170m. comcast's strategy was to make plaxo the address book layer for its broadband subscribers' xfinity accounts. that did not happen at any meaningful scale.

~ the funny part ~

the part of plaxo that survives in collective memory is not the product. it is the email. in 2006 the ceo at the time, ben golub, publicly apologized for what he called acquaintance spam. by then the apology was eight years too late for the inbox of every journalist who had been receiving update requests since 2003. the service quietly turned off bulk invites by default and kept growing on the back of the outlook plugin, but the brand had already calcified into shorthand for a specific class of viral-marketing hostility that only one product had really pioneered.

~ what got buried with it ~

under comcast, plaxo went silent for almost a decade. a 2011 relaunch as a smart address book and a 2014 mobile app both came and went without moving the needle. on 1 october 2017 comcast notified users the service would cease on 31 december 2017. by that point most of the active users had migrated to gmail's contact sync or icloud's contact sync, where the address-book-as-service model actually shipped at the operating system layer. plaxo shut down without a successor and without anyone really noticing.

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