Power.com Wants To Aggregate Your Social Self

Power.com social networking networking

Power.com is a Brazil-based company that has stealthily registered more than 5 million members in the past year or so. The company has also raised about $8 million in venture capital, the New York Times reports. Last year, angel investors accounted for $2 million while Draper Fisher Jurvetson -- the notable venture capital firm that aided Hotmail and Skype -- threw $6 million into Power.com.

"Today many people have multiple social network, e-mail and IM accounts," Steve Vachani, CEO of Power.com said in a statement. "Power synchronizes their friends, messages, photos, updates and everything they care about. We're taking down the boundaries between social sites, so users can keep in touch, and even synchronize friends and photos automatically. We call this Social Inter-networking."

Currently, Power.com is pulling content from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Orkut. Right now it looks like Power.com is scrapping content from those social networks, so it remains to be seen how Facebook, MySpace, et al react when and if Power.com starts to challenge them for social networking dominance.

Using Power.com is relatively easy. Interested users register for an account then provide the information for their existing social networking inside the social inter-networking site. Contacts, status updates, messages and posted content are all pulled onto Power.com, where they are listed by user as opposed to the social network they came from.

The idea is for users to have access to everything that is going on around them in their social networking world pulled into a single spot while simultaneously have access to all of their friends' updates as well. Logging into Power.com logs users into all the social networking sites they have registered through Power.

One click takes a user to LinkedIn, for example, and another goes back to Power, allowing for quick updates and the ability to be aware of what's going on around them.

It sounds like a good idea, an idea that social networking power users might be keen to adopt and try out. But why should this one social networking aggregate site work where others have failed?

In my case, I have a FriendFeed account that has been woefully neglected in the past few months. I managed to wrangle an invite to Chi.mp, which does nearly the same thing as Power.com, with more privacy features.

I Twitter and comment on blogs. I maintain a robust presence on Facebook now that I switched my allegiance from MySpace a year or so ago. I share content on Google Reader daily. I don't feel constrained by the fact that it takes me a couple of clicks and a few seconds of typing a URL in order to navigate from one site to the other -- that's not to say I wouldn't embrace a single point of entry for all of them.

I've played with Chi.mp quite a bit, but I came to the realization that it hasn't been very useful for me. Why? Because, simply put, there aren't a lot of users on it. I realize it may be unfair to criticize a product that is still in alpha or very early beta over the number of users it has, but, ultimately, isn't that the point? How social can a network -- inter-network or not -- be when there's not much socialization going on there?

Right now Power.com is ramping up its presence in order to most likely gain a larger foothold in the United States " currently the majority of the users come from Orkut. Can everyone reading this that uses Orkut please raise their hand?

But Power.com might succeed where others have failed. I joined Chi.mp expressly because I was hoping to aggregate all of my social networking to a single place. The site is improving, but it's not where I want it to be yet. Maybe Power.com really does have some mojo that the other sites where missing. Time will tell.