Power.com: The Connector of Social Networks

You have have seen a press piece or three about Power.com lately. If you haven't lemme tell you about it. Basically, it is a service that interconnects presences across multiple social networks. SO you can monitor and update your presences and personal contacts from a single location. So what networks are Powerable at this point?

MySpace
Orkut
Hi5

And, according to Tech Crunch, Facebook soon. Wrote Erick Shonfeld:

Power.com lets you sign into multiple social networks and manage them from one place, but it did not use Facebook’s API or Facebook Connect. As part of the settlement, Power will access this data via Facebook Connect. Power was scraping the data from Facebook and caching it, which it won’t be allowed to do with Facebook Connect.

Facebook is very particular about how it wants other Websites to access its user data. Facebook had similar problems with Google’s Friend Connect, although it simply banned Google from using its API rather than bring a lawsuit.

For Websites and services that want to tap into Facebook’s rich trove of user data (it now has 150 million active users worldwide), it has to do so by Facebook’s rules. But one of those rules, in particular, many partners are finding restrictive. They are not allowed to cache any data, so they cannot build their own user profiles or make their services smarter over time. There are good privacy reasons for not allowing other (possibly unscrupulous) sites to cache the data, but it also serves to limit innovation.

Here's part of what Claire Cain Miller's Bits blog at the NYT has to say about Power:

Venture capitalists have turned a cold shoulder to new social networks. Many of those still interested in Web 2.0 investments are seeking ways to streamline the social Web.

“We’ve been looking at this overarching question of where does social networking go in the longer term,” said Andreas Stavropoulos, the Draper managing director who led the investment in Power.com. “A lot of properties, like Facebook, MySpace and others, become these islands unto themselves. What we saw in Power was a way of opening up these islands and connecting them.”

Once a user enters his or her log-in information for a social network, Power.com accesses the site as if it was the user. Power.com does not have permission from the social networks to use their sites in this way. Mr. Vachani compared it with the way social networks import users’ e-mail address books to connect them with their friends, or the way Meebo, also backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, accesses users’ instant message accounts.

Most of the time Power.com displays the user’s social networking pages without changing them, keeping the original advertisements. But in some instances users can read and respond to a message received at one of those sites without actually visiting the site. That could potentially irritate sites that do not want to sacrifice page views.

Power is based in Brazil and has great backing from VCs. As they have already attracted more then 5 million members, it's clear that there is a tremendous consumer need to simplify this world of closed gardens into a cohesive whole. We need ways to bring us closer to all our contacts, not separate us with arbitrary walls. Power.com is doing just that, and by all acocunts doing it very well, indeed.