Money through blogging

Power.com is a social network aggregator which helps people “link” all their social networks (Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, etc.). For those that don’t really know, it had a huge start when it was first launched in November 2008. Many users quickly stormed to the site to make it their “everything” social site. Wanna chat with Robert on Myspace AND Michelle on Facebook? Power.com help. The only problem with their “plan” is that they started taking users away from these sites… and guess who got pissed?

It wasn’t until recently that Facebook denied these wonderous powers to Power.com, but Myspace had to jump on the bandwagon. Facebook actually took blocking out Power.com a step further and sued the social networking site for scraping data from the Facebook.com site. The lawsuit was resolved, but it got a lot of the other sites thinking as well: let’s stop these leaching freaks!

It was said that Myspace users logging into their accounts was a bit more compromised than many of the other social networking sites. Power.com stored the logins/passwords on their servers rather than just using Myspace’s “OAuth” authentication method (for the non-savvy people: it means that instead of logging into Myspace servers through Myspace using Power.com, they just kept your login information and logged in themselves… sort of like a “middle man” service). Big no-no. Super serious charges, and I don’t blame Myspace at all for being pissed.

For those interested in Myspace’s direct statement, I’ve posted it 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.