I see that Plaxo has hit another patch of bad press, this time regarding the apparent unfriendly departure (or lock out?) of the founder, Sean Parker.

Matt Marshall

[from The Mercury News]

The company sent out an anonymous, terse statement that Parker is ``no longer with Plaxo,'' but called him a ``visionary, creative entrepreneur'' and ended with: ``We thank him for his hard work and wish him well.''

In reality, though, a source said Parker has been locked out, and everyone at the company has been instructed not to talk with Parker, except by way of the company's lawyer, Ray Hickson.

When contacted and asked whether this arrangement is ``normal,'' Hickson said: ``I can't discuss a client personnel matter with newspaper reporters.''

Parker himself issued a terse statement: ``While the company is moving to a new stage of its growth, the management team remains committed to executing my original vision,'' he said. ``The company remains in capable hands.''

Many of the players concerned wouldn't comment for this article.

While I am a user of Plaxo, and have argued for the use of 'contact unmanagement' solutions long and loud. I have had a hard time getting the business model of Plaxo. When I spoke with various representatives of the company a few months ago in California, they seemed bound and determined to not push into near-term and obvious opportunities to monetize Plaxo's growing user base.

For example, the social networking avenue for Plaxo seems obvious and natural, but the folks I met with seemed uninterested. Perhaps they were great actors, pulling the wool over my eyes, and they have a plan in the back room to attack that market.

But if you have 1M+ users (a threshold they crossed in December), I can imagine a number of ways to meter the product to make money, epsecially when you already have a peer-to-peer infrastructure and a client integrated into Outlook on the customer's desktop. Better alternatives to today's messaging mess, for example, with Plaxo acting as a trusted intermediary for digital identity management, or a peer-to-peer real-time messaging capability.

At any rate, the folks running the show there now [which better not be "Anonymous" for long] will either figure out a way to ramp up a financial model, or else we might soon be uninstalling the Plaxo client.

Mentioned by Joi Ito and Jason Calacanis, too.