Social network aggregator Power.com was off to a hot start when it launched in late November. The service, which lets users access and share content among several social networking sites at once, raised $5 million in venture financing from Silicon Valley-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and attracted a whopping 5 million users during its private beta period. Things were looking good.
Then Facebook sued them for inappropriately storing user credentials and scraping data from the Facebook site.
That lawsuit has since been resolved, although Power had to make significant changes to its service. Now, MySpace says they’ve blocked Power.com from accessing user accounts for similar reasons.
Power.com chooses not to use MySpace’s OAuth authentication mechanism, instead directly storing user credentials on its servers. That’s a big security issue, MySpace told me earlier today, and negotiations with Power.com to change its authentication process haven’t been resolved to MySpace’s satisfaction. That leaves them no choice, they say, but to block Power.com to protect users.
Frankly, MySpace is 100% right. Unlike Facebook, they’re not being unreasonable about sharing user data. But the authentication issue is very serious, and Power.com needs to make changes.
MySpace is also concerned with the abundant use of their logo and name on the Power.com site, which could give users a false sense of security when entering their credentials. MySpace is mentioned multiple times on the Power.com sign-in page.
MySpace’s statement is below:
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.
Something’s seriously wrong there. Check out the terms of use link on the Power.com site. It points to *Google’s* terms of use.
WTF???
http://power.co...wer%2fhome.aspx
No, it comes up as their own terms of use for me.
same here too
http://www.cashcratescam.com/
5 Million people signed up for the beta? I wouldn’t sign into any of my accounts from that site just by the extremely poor UI.
Seems like you could do better and without needing $6 Million in financing.
Just do it or STFU.
I’m with Cail. Do it or STFU.
Remember that next time you complain that a movie is “bad” – do it or STFU.
Ouch… another DFJ investment is toast.
power is not having a good week. powr.com and locator dude lost this week to Wise.com in the AlwaysOn Vator Game Changer competition.
http://www.vato...hangers-contest
power is pushing the envelope of a one stop open social id network of other peoples social sites. not a great strategic place to be for power.
locator dude can offer users a custom social location on a network of over 1300 location based niche properties he owns.
SocialLocator.com – let’s get it on!
5million? I find that very hard to believe. Look at their traffic numbers: http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
Also, I’d love to see their comscore numbers. Any chance of posting comscore Mike? Us mortals can’t get those figures
very interesting development… thanks!
power.com was powerscrap.com before they buy “power.com” domain.
how and who did this company blow to get vc funding. this company just seem shady from top to bottom.
power.com dead pool the amount of bad press isnt good
And most importantly, they’re based in Brazil. The “not invented here” syndrome is rampant in SV and Ivy League states.
How do you mean? I was reading the MySpace Developer TOS yesterday and from what I saw nothing can be stored for more than 24 hours, (like facebook). Is there something I’m missing?
It states…”The tactics being used by Power.com are compromising our ability to keep user data safe, private, and within our users’ control.”
Sounds exactly what Delver is doing wrong and no one seems to care. Anyone from there care to justify this since you are so sure that your “personalized” searches start with stealing people’s profiles and pictures to create something they didn’t want or have any control over? I cannot change my profile it is still posted and it has been private on myspace for several weeks now.
Sam: We (being Delver) do not store user credentials. Where information is not publically available we use the information provider’s (e.g. Facebook’s) authentication mechanism on a purely opt-in basis; in other words, you never give Delver your username/password for another service.
As to your own problem, our update mechanism is undergoing a major overhaul and I believe your change will register soon enough.
Disclaimer: Obviously I work for Delver; this is purely my own opinion and not necessarily representative of the company’s official policy. This is, however, the spirit with which we (the engineers) build the product.
Also, you might consider Google Cache and The Wayback Machine, both of which will retain your website even after you remove it.
Sorry but search engine caches such as Google Cache and The Wayback Machine only show ORIGINAL content as it was formatted in the original source, whereas Delver copies and pastes from various sources to create their own profiles. If they were only a “search” or “cache” of information, then they should not be posting myspace pictures together with flickr id and facebook full names. There is a serious breach of privacy and confidentiality when your flickr or myspace friends can find your real name and where you live.
Social network aggregators such as power.com are only OFFERING a service that some may find helpful and can choose to register for, they are not doing anything without user permission or knowledge.
To someone who might know a bit about law:
Would this would be a huge SOX compliance issue for Myspace if they were to use Power.com?
Where is Power.com getting these user credentials? If it is from the users themselves then what business is it of MySpace or anybody else? If a user wants to compromise their account by giving credentials to a 3rd party, yes, it’s dumb, buy letting people be dumb is what makes capitalism work.
- Curtis
http://ShipItOnTheSide.com – Build a software startup as a side job.
I dont Power.com. Im not giving my username and password to some company in Brazil. Sorry, not gonna happen..
I love power.com. It’s a really solid product that allow me to gather together all my profiles from other websites.
As a founder of the first social network aggregator ProfileLinker I can comment that Power.com is going to have an uphill battle converting the major social network sites. It’s tricky because these are the most benefits to the end user.
I think it’s important to note that with security aside Power.com and most social network aggregators have good intentions for the end user. Who wants to sign into 5 social network (some niche and some not). I cannot wait for the day when I can login to one page and see what’s going on across the board.
I tip my hat to facebook connect for starting to lower green wall.
-Brian
Ouch.
The only way that Power.com can get rid of this bad news is to ask permission to all those social network and educate them.
Nat
http://www.halflet.com
You’d have thought the VC involved might have done some due diligence to make sure the entire business model wasn’t based on an insecure and essentially unofficial scraping of social networks’ data… Good luck to them, I’m sure they are a little jittery now.
Maybe Power.com is better off just shutting down and going to run and hide in their mommy’s house and start over again?
this is real discrimination and its really pathetic.
If power.com happens to silicon valley startup, they would have love them… shit ya all
From the comments here, there is obviously a lot segregation, ‘locationism’ and I dare say racism on the web. Is Power.com bad or is the problem that they are a Brazilian company? While I recognize the influence of America on the net, the idea that you can only succeed or get support if you come to America or you are American is not good. If everybody decides to come over to America, you guys will be the first to complain that foreigners have ‘invaded’ your domain. The beauty of the Internet is that location should not matter!
This isn’t an argument of race or ethnicity. It is an argument of an outside company using questionable tactics to fast track itself in front of the eyes of hundreds of millions of users and profit from the work of other hard working risk taking companies.
I will give them some credit though, unlike clone Facebook sites which just copy the UI and functionality bit by bit, power is at least trying to provide some value by allowing users to aggregate their social information into one place. At the same time, they want something for nothing in that they take data from other providers but serve their own ads. How do you expect any of the companies (myspace, facebook, google, hi5) to hire engineers, buy servers, and pay electrical bills so their data can be routed into someone elses back pocket? People would have this same impression of them even if they were in Silicon Valley. Again, not a race issue, just an issue of business ethics.
When you say outside, what do you mean? Outside the companies or outside the US? I’ll assume you mean outside the company. Please have a look at the comments and you will understand where I am coming from.
As for them stealing other peoples sweat, isn’t there a way for a deal to be worked out? What stops Facebook or any other website to demand revenue from ads served on Facebook through the site? Mind you, the complete site shows up in power.com
Boycott israeli web 2.0 apps:
Jajah
Aniboom
Metacafe
Speedbit
Foxytunes
MySupermarket
Zlango
MyHeritage
WeFi
eSnips
PicApp
I apologize for my previous post.
Now that I think about it, maybe if the Palestinians invested their creativity and R&D in Web 2.0 start-ups instead of in building crude missiles and digging tunnels to smuggle explosives, the Middle East would have looked differently.
So much creativity in the Arab world appears to be tunneled to one direction only: hatred.
No need to apologize.
How do you expect them to do any R&D under the conditions they’re forced to live in?
Boycotting is cruel, but as a response to bombing their children it’s pretty fair I think. These israeli entrepreneurs should blame their governments.
There is no excuse for killing innocent children and people, for both sides.
Lot of free publicity for Power.com, that’s for sure.
Bad publicity . . . but they say bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. I ran across a new one, socialcatch.com. It looks like they are just signing up people right now though.
I had an Orkut account many many moons ago,… this post is filed under `things that make you go hmmm` …
Will Disby suffer the same wrath of Facebook ?
ciao,
JP
Data scraping is unreliable and ad-hoc at best compare to a public API. Why don’t we all share things with each other? Well, it’s human nature to be a little self-fish I guess.
wat yalll homie out there