Recently, I interviewed Steve Vachani, CEO and founder of Power.com, a one-stop-shop social network where users can access their profiles from Facebook, hi5, Orkut and MySpace. I kept asking Vachani if Power.com was in compliance with the other social networks since his service allows for access and mashups of the services. Vachani insisted that he was in compliance.
Apparently, Facebook didn’t think so. On December 30, 2008, Facebook filed a complaint in Federal court in California. The filing is embedded below.
In the complaint, Facebook alleges that Power.com infringes on Facebook’s trademarks and copyrights, and its unauthorized solicitation, use and storage of Facebook’s users’ login information to gain unauthorized access to Facebook’s network.
You’ll note that Power.com has taken Facebook off its site.
Here’s my interview with Vachani, and what he said about working with other social networks.
But
the one obvious question is whether Power.com is compliance with the
terms of use of all the other social networks. After all, even Vachani
would say that he’s aiding the end user to “mash up” content and
services from the different social networks. “Do you have a
relationship with the social networks?” I asked. “We have a
relationship with the user,” he responded. “What does Facebook Connect
do?” he went on. “Facebook Connect allows other sites to connect to
Facebook. What we do is allow anyone connect to the user… Facebook
isn’t at the center. The user is at the center.”
Vachani goes
onto explain that he views Power.com as a browser or a desktop. From
one place, you can access multiple sites and services without having to
have a relationship with each site or service. Power is just a
launching point. And, mixing contacts from one social network to
another is similar to being on a social network and importing contact
lists from an email account, he said. The mash-up of networks is all
part of this movement toward data portability and a single sign-on. “We
call this a borderless Internet,” he said.
