Power.com in Trouble Again
For those of you who read my blog on a regular basis you will be familiar with this story. I have been following Power.com for several months. The company had a great idea but one I didn’t predicted wouldn’t fly, at least not using the methodology they were using. What Power.com is, is a social aggregator of sorts. Basically it allowed you to login to a single interface where you could see information from multiple social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace. This presents a couple problems. First, Power.com stores your login credentials which most major sites will not allow. Second, the business model behind Power.com is basically to steal traffic from the big social networking sites that rely on traffic for revenue.
Anyway, at the end of December Facebook shut them down. They’re back online now with Facebook access but it is greatly reduced almost to the point of being useless. Now MySpace.com has made similar objections. Below is the statement from MySpace.
MySpace has been in talks with Brazilian Website Power.com to express our objections with how the company has been collecting user data from the global MySpace community and to persuade Power.com to implement MySpace’s secure log-in authentication process.
From the home page of their site, Power.com is soliciting MySpace users for their private credentials including username and password in order to gain access to MySpace profiles and is using the MySpace trademark in doing so. Power.com’s actions violate our Terms of Service and their methodology to collect this information implies an affiliation with MySpace that confuses our community and gives our users a false sense of security that MySpace has endorsed the practices of Power.com. In fact no official partnership or other affiliation between the two companies exists. While we are in conversations with Power.com, their failure to implement MySpace’s secure log-in authentication process in accordance with our Terms of Service presents us with a unique set of security challenges. Per our stringent safety policies created to protect sensitive user information, effective immediately, MySpace will no longer allow Power.com to gain access to user accounts.
It’s imperative that MySpace is able to effectively manage site security. The tactics being used by Power.com are compromising our ability to keep user data safe, private, and within our users’ control. Our goal is to help create a more social Web but key functionalities such as a simplified and secure log-in authentication process must be protected and maintained. As of today, Power.com is refusing to implement a simple technology provided by MySpace that would secure this process for our global users. We are confident that we’ll come to a resolution with Power.com quickly.
Like I said previously, Power.com had a great idea, I had thought of it myself quite some time ago. The only problem is you can’t create a meaningful service from the information the main social networking sites will let you take outside their system.
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