Brazilian Web start-up Power.com has revealed they were planning to become a portal via
which Internet users would be able to access the social networking sites they
had accounts on, without having to visit them separately.
Backed up by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and technology investor and analyst Esther Dyson, Power.com will aggregate users’ social network updates, e-mail, instant messages and contact lists, so as to allow people to better and more rapidly surf their online social lives.
For the time being, the company has added to its dashboard social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut and MSN, with future plans to enable access to other services of the like.
Both Yahoo and Google are aiming to become central to Web
users’ online social interaction, whereas Meebo already offers people access to
multiple instant messaging services. The latter Ajax-based in-browser instant
messaging program currently supports Yahoo! Messenger, .NET Messenger Service, Google
Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber.
Started by Steve Vachani, who serves as the company’s chief executive, Power.com has now 70 employees and 5 million registered users, 3 million of whom visit the site on a monthly basis, according to Vachani.
Initially, the company only worked with Google-run social networking website Orkut, which is the most visited one in Brazil, with 53.86% of the site’s users coming from the country.
Steve Vachani has stated that starting Monday, Power.com would try and recruit users from the United States, as well.