Newly launched Power.com, a service that lets users aggregate their social networking experience across multiple sites (Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace, etc.), was sued by Facebook on December 30. The complaint, filed in Federal court in California, is embedded below.

The Power.com service lets users view activities on all of their social networks at once. It also marks up pages to include additional functionality in a way that Greasemonkey users are familiar with.

Facebook clearly doesn’t like it, even though users must explicitly sign up for the service and access it via the Power.com website. In the complaint Facebook alleges that Power.com violates its terms of use, copyright and trademarks. Specifically they object to the storage of user credentials on the Power.com servers, the scraping of “proprietary data” from Facebook (user data), and other issues.

In some ways this is similar to the actions Facebook took to block Google Friend Connect from accessing Facebook accounts last May. When third parties access Facebook, they want it done the way they want it done – via the API and Facebook Connect. Other methods, even if approved by the users themselves, are going to be aggressively countered.

For now Power.com has removed Facebook access from the site. If the Google Friend Connect situation is anything to go by, don’t expect to see it back any time soon. Or ever.

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
Facebook Complaint Against Power.com – Free Legal Forms