Facebook may be looking to acquire Plaxo, a social community and online address book, according to VentureBeat, which cites an unnamed source who says the social network is "100 per cent" buying Plaxo. Tech Crunch shot down the rumour immediately, saying its sources consider such a move "very unlikely". At the beginning of Jan, the online address book said it was looking to sell up and shortly afterwards claimed it had already received an offer of more than USD200m. However, Tech Crunch says that Facebook is highly unlikely to have been the bidder, arguing that the social network giant would have no interest in spending such money on a company that only has 1.8m visitors per month, compared with Facebook's 100m monthly visitors. Despite this, VentureBeat argues that there are a number of good reasons why Facebook might be interested in the online address book.

The Sillicon Valley blog argues that Facebook's recent decision to join the Dataportability Group demonstrates that it is looking to open up its network to enable users to import and export data and that Plaxo has technology, which would aid the social networking site in doing this. Plaxo allows users of its address book service to transfer their contact information to home email systems, such as Microsoft Outlook, Mac Mail and Thunderbird, by means of plug-ins. In addition, the online address book company's 'Pulse' newsfeed allows users to pull information from other social networks, unlike Facebook's.

In spite of joining the Dataportability Group, some are doubtful as to how interested Facebook is in opening up: in early Jan, it disabled the account of tech-blogger Robert Scoble for moving his 'social graph' out of the network. It is likely that Facebook has the cash to do a deal, after it reportedly received USD500m in funding in Nov, following Microsoft's USD240m investment. But, it is very unclear how inclined the social network would be to do such a deal.