• BusinessWeek, Tuesday, December 2, 2008 12:15 PM

Does Power.com have the power to unseat the likes of MySpace and Facebook as the top social networking site? Probably not, but the Rio de Janeiro-based company, with its tools for synchronizing social networking features and services, will be useful to those overextended users with multiple social networking accounts. Power.com currently allows you to view and manage your Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, MSN Messenger, Orkut, and YouTube accounts all from one location. It hopes to soon add LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Skype and others soon. The company raised $2 million in funding last year and looks set to add another $6 million this year.

According to the company's press release, here's how it works: Users' "Power start page shows them all of their friends, messages, and content -- from all their social networks, instant messengers, and email accounts -- in one place ... Once users log on to Power.com, they are automatically logged on everywhere that matters. They go from Power.com to their page on any one of their social networks with one click."

As BusinessWeek's Robert Hof points out, it's kind of like Meebo, which lets you sign onto all of your instant messaging accounts from one place, on steroids. "We're taking down the boundaries between social sites," says CEO Steve Vachani, who tells Hof that he doesn't see the efforts by Facebook, Google, MySpace and others to take their profile information to other sites as open enough to be all-inclusive. That said, while Power.com is easy to set up, "putting all this information together can get a little dizzying, especially when single services such as MySpace and Facebook are already looking mighty cluttered all by themselves."

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