At the beginning of the year, Facebook filed a complaint against Power.com accusing them of copyright and trademark infringement and unlawful competition.  Power.com was attempting to act as an aggregated social network where users can enter login information for MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hi5, Orkut, and Facebook and all of their contact information would be updated at once amongst all the networks.

Facebook blocked access and sued them in January as a result.  Now Power.com has responded with their own lawsuit alleging that Facebook is trying to monopolize the social networking industry.

Power.com started in Brazil and tried to capture the U.S. audience this past December with help from investors such as DFJ and Esther Dyson.  Power.com wanted “to be the center of the world” according to CEO Steve Vachani.  Power.com has a huge spike in traffic, but then it died out.

At one point there was 8 million users and just last month there were only 14,000 U.S. users that visited their website according to analytics web company Compete.com.  Power.com claims that they received 250,000 unique visitors in the U.S. last month.

Power.com stated that Facebook is stifling competition by blocking access to their service. But Facebook made a statement saying that they made many attempts to work with Power.com but claims that they continued to put user data at risk.

[via NYT]

Power.com is a social networking company with 5 million users and is based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  The company raised $8 million Series A investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.  On December 30, Facebook sued Power.com.

Power.com aggregates all of the activities from different social networks and places it on one page.  Facebook claims that Power.com is violating copyright and trademarks.  Facebook also referenced the scraping of proprietary data from the social network in the lawsuit.

“After discussing the issues with Power.com for about a month without reaching a resolution, we filed a lawsuit to enforce our terms of service, maintain the integrity of our site and to assure our users’ privacy and security are protected,” stated Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Facebook.

Steve Vachani, founder of Power.com stated that his company has been in discussions with Facebook to get their feedback.  Facebook suggested that Power.com uses Facebook Connect instead of scraping the data directly.

Facebook attempted to stop Power.com for using data without permission.  The first complaint was sent on December 1 when Power.com was first announced.  On December 12, Vachani stated that Facebook Connect would be implemented in two weeks but then asked for an extension.  After December 26, Power.com kept using Facebook in an unauthorized manner.

That was the last straw.  Stay tuned for more updates regarding this lawsuit.

[via TechCrunch]