EfluxMedia

Comcast announced Wednesday that it will acquire social network site pioneer Plaxo. The deal is valued somewhere around $135million to $175 million, and is intended to make the social portal part of Comcast Interactive Media. Plaxo will remain located in Silicon Valley and one of the things it could do is work with Comcast’s Fancast Internet to facilitate users’ access to the internet service provider’s movies and TV shows database.

Comcast and Plaxo have been partners since early last year, and have been working together on integrating e-mail and voicemail via the SmartZone service. The takeover will also help Comcast in offering social network links to the devices connected by it, from video recorders to TVs and even to wireless equipment. This way, Comcast subscribers may be offered the possibility to share videos or photos through these devices by using the company’s service.

Plaxo was one of the companies that first saw the social possibilities that lay in the address books of the users and has put the foundations of the concepts that other networking sites such as Facebook work. However, the start was slow and the company got a bad reputation because it used to flood peoples’ inboxes every time one of the persons in their address book made an update to his or her profile.

The company founded in 2001 by Todd Masonis, Cameron Ring and Sean “Napster” Parker says it has 15 million registered users, although it has never turned a profit.

Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Harbinger Venture Management, and Cisco Systems as well as former Yahoo Chief Executive Timothy Koogle have backed the company with more than $20 million over the years. The social network pioneer has also worked on different projects with big companies like Google, Microsoft or Apple.