The wildly popular Daily Candy is owned by Pilot Group Ventures, and has been the target of several acquisition rumors. But this one may hold water since Comcast has been on a digital acquisition binge of late (including most recently, social media site Plaxo).

Plaxo Pulse collects information from Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Facebook and many others the report continues. The original goal of the site was to keep address books up to date, but because of this intention, the company sent out millions of emails which came across as spam.

The company was founded in 2001 by Todd Masonis, Cameron Ring and Sean “Napster” Parker. Sequoia Capital has given over $20 million to the company over the years. The report concluded that Plaxo has hired Revolution Partners to handle the auction.

The group includes Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Since it opened its site to outside developers last spring, Facebook has had over 5,000 small programs built to run on its site.

The plan was supposed to be unveiled at a Google party tomorrow night, but people briefed on this, let the New York Times know about it and Google confirmed to the publication.

An anonymous source said to the NY Times “It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook.” OpenSocial as the platform will be known is “compatible across all the companies,” according to that same source.

The group will also include software makers Oracle and Salesforce.com. The aim is to expand the spectrum of social networks for developers so as Facebook does not hold a monopoly over this market, however for the time being it remains the platform of choice for developers and U.S. users.

Site in the alliance have a combined 100 million users, the report continues, which is over twice as many users as Facebook. Expected at the event at the Google headquarters are the developers of popular Facebook apps like Slide, iLike, Frixter and RockYou.

Eric E. Schmidt, CEO of Google was quoted in the NY Times to say “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real. If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Google has ad deals with many social networks, as well as a $900 million deal to sell ads on MySpace. There is also money coming Google’s way through ads running on Facebook apps. This step towards dethroning Facebook, so to speak, is just more proof in the power behind the social network and social networking features. It is undeniable that we are in the age of the social network.

This move is an effort on Plaxo’s part to maintain the company’s original goals of creating a user-customizable, open network. The company put out a release that stated they wanted to, “open up the social graph,” also deeming Pulse the “anti-facebook.”