Parker recently proposed to Alexandra Lenas, a New York-based singer/songwriter, “his rep” told People.

Parker, popularly known for being played by Justin Timberlake in “The Social Network,” has something like a four percent stake in Facebook, meaning the -illions to his name begin with a b.

Parker is credited, both in fictional and non-fictional retellings of the story, for helping Mark Zuckerberg retain lasting control of Facebook. Parker has also played significant roles at Napster, Plaxo, Causes.com, Founders Fund and Spotify, and may be considering putting together a bid for Warner Music Group.

But now, at a time where you can find such social aggregators everywhere, and with much of the company leadership having left the building, Plaxo is getting rid of social. At the same time, the company is launching a paid “Personal Assistant” tool that scours public Web information (including social networks) for contact information updates and keeps address books updated.

This comes at a time when the address book is increasingly relevant as a core battleground for the center of users’ online social lives, whether on their phones, email or a social network. For instance, Google recently dropped Facebook merging from its phone book on the Android Nexus S. Plaxo has never been too far from the zeitgeist, but it’s always been out the outskirts.

The digital entrepreneur is considering putting his money into a consortium bidding on Warner Music Group, which put itself on the block earlier this year. Sources tell me that Parker isn’t part of the formal bid, but is aligned with a group led by investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum.

Given that Warner’s owners are expecting to fetch $2.5 billion or more for the company, Parker’s own capital wouldn’t be material to the Burkle-Teitelbaum bid. (Burkle, a billionaire who made his first fortune in the supermarket business, invests via his Yucaipa holding company; Teitelbaum helps run hedge fund Bay Harbour Management.)

But Parker’s interest in the music company, expressed in a letter Burkle’s deal team submitted to Warner’s bankers at the beginning of the bidding process, is still very interesting. Here’s a wonderkid who made his money and reputation via bits and bytes, putting his cash — and, presumably, some of his insight — in a media business that still makes most of its money selling analog goods.

Parker famously helped found Napster in 1999, moved onto address book startup Plaxo and helped guide Facebook in its early days. That move gave him an equity stake in the company, and enough money to do whatever he wants (Forbes pegs his net worth at $1.6 billion, and that estimate may be low). Most recently he’s been working, as an adviser and investor, with Spotify, the streaming music service.

Spotify is a big deal in Europe, where it has a million paying subscribers and 7 million active users. But it has yet to land in the U.S., because it hasn’t come to term with two of the big music labels — Universal Music Group and Warner.

I’ve heard a couple people suggest that Parker is trying to buy the label in order to get that deal done. But that theory doesn’t make much sense, because there are much cheaper ways to get Warner to license its music.

Easier conclusion: Parker believes that intellectual property — in this case, Warner’s catalog — is undervalued, in part because of the digital revolution he helped usher in more than a decade ago.

In any case, Parker’s interest may end up being academic. Burkle and Teitlebaum are one of at least five bidders trying to buy all or part of Warner. The music label, which is controlled by a consortium of private equity investors, expects to make a decision on its sale in the next few weeks.

[Image via Wikipedia]

The idea is to protect cable subscription revenues by giving pay TV customers–but only pay TV customers–Web access to all the shows they get on TV, and hoping this keeps them from canceling their subscriptions.

But that’s old news: Comcast (CMCSA) already told Bloomberg earlier this month that the two companies are linking up, and that Time Warner (TWX) would offer programming from some of its networks in the first part of Comcast’s tests.

Presumably Bewkes and Roberts will offer up a few more details, like which Time Warner networks are participating (good bet: TNT and/or TBS), along with a timetable. But I worry that the press conference will be light on details, in large part because many of the details haven’t been hammered out yet.

Still, I’ve been able to glean more from industry executives who’ve been involved in discussions with Time Warner, Comcast and other players in the authentication effort, which Bewkes has been calling “TV Everywhere” and Roberts has been calling “OnDemand Online.” Some of the details:

• The test will start very small–with some 5,000 subscribers–but Comcast is determined to expand it aggressively and wants to have it available throughout its system by the end of the year. Comcast plans to use its Fancast video portal as a hub for its efforts. And it  may use other digital assets it has acquired as well. Online Rolodex Plaxo, for instance, which the company bought last year, could be used to help subscribers sign in to watch their shows.
• The test is separate from Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) own authentication offering, which is essentially the same thing but will launch later than the Comcast test, using different technology, and will likely offer a different mix of programming.
• And those tests are separate from the one that telcos Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) have been working on with satellite operators Echostar (SATS) and DirecTV (DTV). That one also has the same thrust, but will take the longest to roll out.
• Comcast isn’t likely to announce other programming partners for the tests until later this month.
• Hulu is interested in playing along, because its owners–GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC–see authentication as a way to appease riled-up cable providers. The cable guys are upset that Hulu shows (some) cable programs for free while they have to pay for the right to air them. In theory, authentication solves that problem for Hulu because everyone will be on a level playing field: Only cable subscribers will get access to cable programming, whether it’s on Hulu, Fancast or anywhere else. But the cable guys aren’t rushing to let Hulu in just yet.
• Separately, NBC has been talking about offering some cable programming that isn’t already on Hulu for the tests. That could also be seen as an appeasement move, but I’ve heard a more benign suggestion: NBC merely wants to figure out if authentication technology works because it is considering using it for some of its coverage of the Vancouver Olympics next year.
• CBS (CBS), which isn’t a part of Hulu and which doesn’t have any cable assets of its own, would still like to get into the mix. The idea is that the network would offer the cable guys shows that it has kept offline until now (say, “The Mentalist”) while tying the Web programming to “retransmission” fees it would like to extract from the cable companies for all of its shows. Comcast executives seem amenable to the notion.
• Big cable players like Viacom (VIA) and Liberty’s (LINTA) Discovery may participate in some trials but not others. Viacom, for instance, has been talking about working with the telco group but not with Comcast during the trials. It has also discussed offering a “premium product”–like access to the full “Spongebob Squarepants” library or other kids’ shows that have a very limited online profile–to Time Warner Cable subscribers for an additional fee.

Bewkes and Roberts are scheduled to speak at the Time Warner Center at 9:45 am EDT, so we’ll know more shortly.

Here’s someone who can take advantage of the new math: Sam Schwartz, who oversees strategy and M&A for Comcast’s (CMCSA) digital group. Schwartz has already guided the cable giant through a shopping spree during the past few years, and while he’s too cautious to say it with force, he’s clearly interested in bulking up some more. And unlike some of his peers, he could do it: “We’re ready for pitches,” he says.*

In the video below, Schwartz walks me through the logic of the deals he’s made to date, many of which–Fandango? Daily Candy? Plaxo–have been head-scratching to outsiders. Some of this makes a bit more sense now: Some of Plaxo’s technology, for instance, will be used to authenticate Comcast subs for its new Web video offering (see below).

And while he doesn’t spell this out specifically in our chat, I get the sense that future deals may be geared toward expanding Comcast’s overall Web audience, which means that sites that have lots of uniques but aren’t quite sure what to do with them may be logical targets. I’m just thinking outloud here, but sure seems like Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL have plenty of assets that fit that bill.

Schwartz also talked about Comcast’s approach to Web video and its plans to launch its “OnDemand Online” service this year. OnDemand Online is supposed to counter both Hulu and pirate Web sites by offering up a wealth of video you can’t already get–legally–on the Web, via Comcast’s Fancast site. The catch: You’ll have to be a Comcast subscriber to get it.

There are plenty of technology optimists who think these kinds of plans are the cable industry’s last gasp–an attempt to keep cable subscribers paying for a bundle of channels and shows they don’t want, instead of simply having them buy the stuff they do want à la carte. Schwartz, not surprisingly, disagrees, and he lays out his argument below.

*Note: An earlier version of this story and headline misquoted Schwartz. Apologies for my mistake.

Designed to help Web publishers easily add social-networking features to their sites, Friend Connect requires just a snippet of code to bring social features to a site along with a means of coordinating them with other social networks like Facebook, Plaxo and Google’s Orkut. It’s another in a recent string of data-portability efforts that hope to apply the distributed model to social networking and put an end to its so-called “walled gardens.”

“The distributed model has worked well for the Web,” David Glazer, Google director of engineering, told Outside the Lines’ Dan Farber. “That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. Now it is working to connect people to other people.”

And all of them to Google AdWords, of course. More Internet usage. More ad revenue.

As far as bubbles go, I suppose that’s fine, since average investors are safe from the machinations of investment bankers and venture capitalists this time and the only ones at risk are the big companies overpaying by doing the acquiring.

Are Plaxo and Digg among the latest targets?

We’ll see. But as we wrote last week, for example, AOL confirmed it bought the content-targeting ad network Quigo (for $300 million, said sources) yesterday, for example, and most expect more buys to occur in the hot ad-network space that includes start-ups like AdBrite and Tribal Fusion.

But with the $240 million mega-investment that Microsoft recently made in Facebook that values the company at $15 billion, look for more deals in that hot space or in related areas.

There’s talk, for example, that Plaxo–which calls itself a universal digital assistant–might get snapped up soon (two sources close to the company said that cable giant Comcast has been in talks with it), although another similar player, LinkedIn, is considering going public (we have a video interview with new CEO Dan Nye, which we will post soon).

And Valleywag had an interesting post on speculation around the fate of Digg, citing rumors that have been swirling for a long time now about the online news discovery site.

The price? The ubiquitous $300 million, which is about 10 times the revenue Digg is now getting from its recent guaranteed sweetheart ad deal with Microsoft.

As we said, money from big companies like Microsoft are propping up the bottom lines of Web 2.0 players, keeping Bubble 2.0 from popping, and leaving average investors to fret about bigger stock worries like subprime mortgages.

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”