• by Wendy Davis , October 26, 2009

A federal judge has rejected social networking aggregator Power.com's claim that Facebook aims to monopolize the social networking space by controlling users' information.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, Calif. ruled that Power's legal papers did not contain enough specific facts for the company to move forward with its monopoly allegation.

The ruling, issued last week, marks the latest twist in a year-old dispute between Power and Facebook. Power allows people with accounts at a variety of social networking sites, including Orkut, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, to access all of their information from one portal. To accomplish this, Power asks users to provide log-in information at the various sites they belong to, and then imports their information.

Facebook objects to this practice, and last year sued Power for copyright infringement for allegedly making temporary copies of Facebook's Web pages in order to extract information.

In July, Power filed papers arguing that Facebook's claims should be dismissed and also alleging that Facebook was itself violating federal antitrust law as well as California's unfair competition law.

Fogel not only dismissed Power's antitrust and unfair competition claims, but also ruled that the company had not adequately answered Facebook's accusations of copyright infringement. He gave Power until Nov. 21 to amend its papers. The company says it intends to do so.