Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.

Plaxo has probably the most clouded reputation of any of the major participants in the current data portability discussion, except perhaps for Microsoft. Comcast is no angel either.Together the two companies will be ill prepared to serve end users well.

The plan for Plaxo at Comcast appears to be for the acquired company to power media publishing, sharing, lifestream aggregation and presumably contact management. The problem is that there's a whole market of alternatives for those services and many users just want their ISPs to deliver the damn internet so they can use it however
they see fit.

Comcast has done a poor job of this lately. By engaging in a practice called "traffic shaping," whereby the company throttles down the bandwidth availab