Power.com. Too Late to Compete with Facebook Connect?

It's been a while since we've seen the launch of a social network aggregator, but alas Power.com has emerged into a public beta today, hoping to offer enough features to outshine similar services we've seen in the past. With $8 million in funding from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and two years in stealth mode, Brazil-based Power.com has had enough foresight to do more than just update your status across Facebook and MySpace. Rolling in Orkut and Hi5, along with a handful of multimedia sharing options for sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, Power.com looks at the whole of your social networking experience for its aggregation purposes. That means that your messages are aggregated, along with groups' activities, community updates, application changes, and more. Similar to Meebo, Power.com offers a central sign-in for a unified experience, giving you a start page with shows the bulk of your cross-network activity. From here you can visit your other social networks with a tidy iFrame view, never having to leave the Power.com service. This is somewhat similar to Flock in theory, as it encourages a good deal of multimedia sharing across networks, though it's not as user friendly from that particular standpoint. But as a third-party application, Power.com will find itself competing with services like Flock or Minggl, as well as Facebook Connect and the rest. While users were getting frustrated from social network aggregators, Facebook, Google, MySpace and OpenID were busy finding ways to open their platforms and work cooperatively across networks. While we haven't reached the open platform utopia just yet, there's a lot to be said about Facebook connecting users with their Digg, Last.fm and Yelp accounts, versus a service that updates Facebook and MySpace at the same time. As we've seen with the ill-fated demise of Matchmine, another third-party service that was moving towards an open approach to media recommendations, Power.com could end up in a bad position as an outsider as the networks themselves find better ways of optimally working with each other. Nevertheless, Power.com has seemingly put a lot of thought into the features it does offer, which are exceedingly more inclusive than most other social networking aggregators I've seen to date. As Power.com is already building out its feature set according to the expectations of networks' own open platforms, this scial networking aggregator could prove to be quite helpful in the end.

Social Pro Daily

Power.com. Too Late to Compete with Facebook Connect?

Kristen Nicole

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Kristen Nicole