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"I had a chance to talk to John McCrea today regarding the acquisition of his company by Comcast, and while a lot of the raw information is probably found elsewhere or in other analysis, the way he laid it all out to me showed me exactly how much sense the joining of these two organizations really made. This is a return visit for him, and he and I always have fun when he's on the show.\nGiven that Comcast isn't a huge shareholder in the Web 2.0 property market, a lot of questions were going around as to what this could possibly integrate with, how much integration Plaxo would make within the Comcast organization.\nAs it turns out, this buyout came as a result of a long relationship that they've had since the Plaxo tools were integrated into the suite of tools given out to Comcast broadband subscribers. Since then, they've continually discussed what an expansion of that partnership would look like.\nWhen he was describing the future of all this, a conversation from an episode of Elite Tech News sprang to mind from a few weeks ago. The topic was whether or not Twitter and FriendFeed would ever see mainstream adoption, or if would forever remain the loved utility of us blogosphere folks.\nThe argument against it becoming widespread was that it just isn't accessible.  For it to be useful, the users really need to be on a wide variety of services like Digg, Google Reader, and Twitter already. This is in contrast to the future that McCrea sees with Plaxo Pulse, where your TV and movie viewing habits will tracked through the Pulse system, and integrated into the set-top box experience.\nYes, the TV becomes the platform, but just as important, the barrier to entry will no longer be existent.  My 92 year old gramma knows how to use the TV.  Explaining FriendFeed to her would be about as useful as explaining underwater basketweaving to her in Latin. Thus, Plaxo's lifestreaming utility is the first to break into the mainstream.\nThis is a potentially groundbreaking partnership in a number of ways, and McCrea definitely puts an interesting new spin on the whole partnership I hadn't heard yet.\nYou can hear all about this in the embed available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.\nNever miss an episode with these links: Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here. Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating).Add directly to your Zune here.\nAre you a regular listener to Mashable Conversations? Consider filling out our Listener Survey.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/plaxo-john-mccrea-comcast/>