Take a look at this article on CNet. Sean Parker, one of the founders of Napster, started a company called Plaxo to help people keep their Outlook contacts up to date. I’ve been sent a couple of contact updates already by friends using products similar to Plaxo. I’m fascinated by the fact that they got $2M from Sequoia. How do you think they intend to make money on this?

"Parker's company is backed in large part by a $2 million round of venture funding last February, led by Sequoia Capital. The product will go live Tuesday and will be distributed freely. He declined to discuss the company's potential plans to generate revenue, but did say Plaxo would not sell or otherwise use any member's contact information without permission."

This is a pretty interesting idea, already done by at least two other companies. Given the fact that they don’t intend to sell contact information without permission, my guess would be that they will use a bait and switch. The service is free for now. Once they have your contacts, they will ask you to pay for privacy or get your agreement to sell your contacts if you choose to keep the service free. If this is really the case, then essentially you would be asked for your permission to sell information about your clients, friends, relatives, whatever that you keep in your contact list. So technically you don’t have to rat out on your own information, just everyone you know.

Let me be the first to state that if Plaxo, GoodContacts, or other companies do this, I think that they deserve scorn like never before seen. Many people now go to some effort to keep their names off of lists by clicking on the checkboxes to prevent it. How would you feel if someone else gave a company permission to read information about you that they kept? This would seem be in violation of some of the new privacy regulations that have been put in place recently. The person who gave Plaxo or GoodContacts would have to get your agreement to give them your contact information.

Any bets that they won’t be doing that? Anyone have other thoughts on where they will make money if not from this?

My latest article on my life in the world of software engineering is posted at Builder.COM. The title is If you are the lone gun, take aim at time bandits. It talks about my latest goings-on — being the CTO of a 3 person startup venture and how to make the best use of your time. The article focuses on the software developer (me) in that sort of environment and has a few ideas on how to stay productive.

If you appreciate the micropublishing boom of weblogs, you have to read this week’s Doonesbury to truly appreciate this phenomenon. Monday’s strip (below) kicks off a great series on this trend and how silly these weblogs can get. As the owner of one such weblog, I’m always aware of how trite these things can get. I’ve primarily focused on the weblog as an easy means to hold a collection of essays that I’ve written, but I’ve put some silly stuff up here also.

Note: The above image, linked in from the Doonesbury web site, should fall under the fair use clause of copyrights.

ITWorld.COM reported on China hijacking Google’s domain name and rerouting it to the site of their choice. I found this fascinating on several different levels.

First of all, there’s no way to stop this, short of every user adding “www.google.com” to their host table (so those more technically saavy will probably do that). “Hijacking”, an overly strong word, is a commonly used approach for managing address translated networks. By having a server on a local network declare itself the start of authority for a domain, any machine on that network that uses that name server will get the IP addresses, whether or not the name server really is the authority. For example, most of my computers run on a 10.x.x.x network, a private, unroutable network. I run two DNS servers — an internal one with k2.com serving up internal IP addresses and then an external one — the one that you use to get to my web site. This way none of my computers gets confused about which systems are which.

A second observation is the idea of how “lawless” the Internet naming system really is. Just think — you pay your money to buy a domain name, but any ISP could redirect it at will. So imagine if some ISP decided that MICROSOFT.COM really needed to point to, oh say, AOL.COM. How much would someone be willing to pay to do that? Is there anything that really stops an ISP from doing that?

Obviously in the US, where there are many ISPs, making a change like that would be hard. But a backbone provider could easily make a change and alter how the downstream ISPs (and their users) see the Internet. Don’t be surprised if this becomes a more prevalent tactic. I could easily see this as the next huge boom in marketing. This could be the business model the ISPs are looking for — you pay your $50k and direct the domain name of your choice to the IP address of your choice.