Comcast is shutting down Plaxo, the social networking company it acquired in 2008.
“We’re saying goodbye to Plaxo,” a notice on the Plaxo web site, first spotted by Variety, explains. “After 15 years of helping users enrich their address books, we will be shutting down the Plaxo service at the end of the day on December 31, 2017.”
With the shutdown imminent, Plaxo noted that it is no longer allowing users to create new accounts, and that it will begin purging user date on Jan. 1, 2018.
“While it’s sad to say goodbye to Plaxo, we’re eager to put more focus into our expanding core products within the xFinity family,” Plaxo noted in this post from the company’s customer service team.
Plaxo also provided a walk-through on how existing users can export their address book data.
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A specific reason for the shutdown was not posted, though Plaxo has been thoroughly upstaged by several other social networking services over the past decade. When Comcast acquired Plaxo, it claimed to have about 50 million registered accounts.
At the time, Comcast was using Plaxo as its universal address book for a communications dashboard service called SmartZone, and used Plaxo to host address book accounts for Comcast web mail users. There were also ambitions to use Plaxo as a platform to share and post photos that would be accessible on mobile devices and TVs.
