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With the tech world holding it’s breath, Bobby Scoble has finally shared the secret of how he screwed up his Facebook account. Apparently he was testing an alpha version of a new Plaxo Pulse feature which collects names, addresses and birthdates. From what the man says, it worked because it identified 1800 Plaxo users out of his 5000 Facebook friends. But Facebook suspended his account.

The big question is, how many of Scoble’s ‘friends’ would really want their name, address and birthdates extracted from the Facebook site?

Tags: Facebook, Plaxo

Plaxo, the social network cum contact manager site, is reportedly on the market for $100million. The Californian company founded mid 2001 has raised around $30million of investment to date but has been eclipsed by Facebook and LinkedIn. Claiming 15million users, although just how many of these are active is questionable, it will no doubt reignite the debate on ‘new-media tech’ valuations. Yet again, the ‘profit’ appears to come from exit strategies relying on fools with a high concentration of greed genes operating in an overhyped market generating oversized valuations. Does the tech market solely revolve around expectations and exits or can anyone turn Web2.0 into a real business?

Revolution Partners are managing the sale. Current Plaxo Investors include Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, Cisco Systems, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich.

http://www.plaxo.com/

Tags: Cisco Systems, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Facebook, Globespan Capital Partners, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Revolution Partners, Sequoia Capital

Word is now out that a Google led alliance will launch OpenSocial on Thursday. OpenSocial is a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including declared partners LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Unlike Facebook which uses its own markup language, developers for OpenSocial will be free to use Flash, html and javascript.

By pulling together with with Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. The alliance and partner pact potentially has a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.

Microsoft recently took a $240million stake in Facebook, valuing the media darling social site at $15billion, despite the fact that it does not make money.

Tags: Facebook, Friendster, Google, hi5, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com