Dear Plaxo member, We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services.

(Emphasis in original.)

Plaxo broke into the market by becoming one of the first social networks via its architecture of address-book auto updates. It also broke into the market by annoying people who signed up, sending them seemingly endless requests to update personal information. You can read more about the Comcast-Plaxo deal here. Writes Redgee Capili, Plaxo's senior privacy officer:

Although Plaxo will be a Comcast subsidiary, we will remain independent - having our own privacy policy, keeping the same management and employees, and continuing the evolution of the address book. The acquisition does not change the Plaxo you already know, except that we look forward to providing more services and features for our users. By becoming a part of Comcast, we believe that we can make our services significantly better for all of our users.

While Plaxo executives and developers say they learned long ago their lesson about the annoyance emails, and say they've reformed (some people still swear by the service), for many early adopters it was too late. Since then, services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have skyrocketed in popularity, while Plaxo has struggled to reinvent itself.

(To this day, there are 76,700 Google search results for the term "Plaxo"+"annoying.")

Plaxo execs say it could be a "few months" before the deal is completed.