Power.com Has Been Sued and I Saw it Coming
When I first heard about the business model behind power.com I couldn’t believe that social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace would allow it to operate. What Power.com does is it aggregates content from various social networking websites like Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, etc so that users of these websites can get all of their social networking data in one central location. This is fantastic for the users but it is bad news for the actual social networking sites themselves. Social networks run on advertising dollars and if visitors are viewing the content at Power.com then they are not seeing the advertisements that support Facebook nor are they adding to the traffic count.
Just about all of the social networking websites have APIs that allow developers to access certain limited pieces of information. This information is limited purposefully to keep users on these websites. It looks like my first inclination was correct. Not surprisingly Facebook filed a lawsuit in Federal court in California on December 30th. In the complaint Facebook alleges that Power.com violates its terms of use, copyright and trademarks. Specifically they object to the storage of user credentials on the Power.com servers, the scraping of “proprietary data” from Facebook (user data), and other related issues.
From what I can tell Facebook has already been removed from Power.com. I would imagine MySpace will go too and without the big two social networks I don’t see much use to bother with Power.com. I am excited to see how Power.com proceeds. I noticed on their homepage they claim that a new and improved version of Facebook will be there soon. I don’t know how they could provide a meaningful experience within the Facebook terms of service. I suppose it may be possible. I am going to keep an eye on it to see what happens. Power.com had a fantastic idea. Too bad part of it isn’t really legal.
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This is a good example of “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” We see this all the time in the web development business. A little critical thinking up front really goes a long way.