Comcast buys Plaxo for $175 million; I have to admit I didn’t see that one coming. Now this is also interesting in the context of ISPs who are outsourcing the delving into their users’ personal data to ISP targeting companies like Adzilla, Phorm and NebuAd. The conventional wisdom here is that lots of small ISPs (and yes there are quite a few of them) will be likely to work with these data players vs. larger ones who might be a bit more circumspect about privacy (though certain ISPs like NetZero, coming out of the ill-fated Free ISP model, find-other-ways-to-make-a-buck have been selling user data for years in various forms).

I have to agree with the article, it’s going to be weird for most Plaxo users, and lots of them will likely go away to bigger and better networks and tools.