Techdirt:More Hype For Plaxo: "More Hype For Plaxo

Contributed by Mike on Tuesday, June 15th, 2004 @ 12:35AM
from the lazy-PR dept.
You can always tell when a lazy PR person has been given the job to hype up some random startup in Silicon Valley. That's when the 'profile' piece comes out, focusing almost entirely on the 22-year-old founder of a company, rather than the company itself or what it does. It looks like that's the latest strategy to hype up Plaxo, with a story that focuses on its young co-founders and the similarities the company has to Yahoo and Google - namely founded by two Stanford students and funded by Michael Moritz. Of course, the article leaves out the differences - such as the fact that a fair number of folks find Plaxo's service both annoying and creepy - and they're still searching for a business model. It also leaves out the fact that one of Plaxo's founders was recently forced out of the company, suggesting that not all is well at Plaxo central. I still fail to see how Plaxo is any more than a small feature of an email system - and the only thing I learned from this article is that the company likes to compare itself to multi-billion dollar companies that actually do have business models. "