SMBs Get Social Networking Bridges from Power.com

Sometimes, the list of ever-growing social networking sites seems confusing and disjointed. For the average small to medium-size business (SMB) owner looking to social networking to boost their business, picking the right social media outlet can be a daunting and unfamiliar task.

One Brazilian-based company is looking to simplify the process by linking social networking sites together. Power.com lets users join by registering their various social networks at Power.com. The Power start page displays all your friends, messages and content from their respective social networks, instant messengers and e-mail accounts, all in one place.

"We visualize a social world that centers around people, not Web sites. The boundaries between different Web sites and different providers are irrelevant to these relationships," Eric Santos, Power's CTO, said in a statement. "Power removes these boundaries, creating a much more natural and open social experience. We are creating a borderless Internet."

The interface may leave some cold, but it is easy enough to test the site; simply log in through one of the social network sites already listed on the site (MySpace and Facebook are the two most likely for U.S.-based users) and you're in. All sites must be accessed via Power.com, which some are already calling a limitation. Flying under the radar, the company already has five million users since debuting in August, though most of those registrants came through Orkut, a Google-run social networking site most popular in Brazil.

With thousands of developers creating applications for social networking, Power's creators hope these developers will turn to Power.com to add what it calls "social inter-networking functionality" on top of their existing Facebook or Google applications. The company cleverly allows Power.com users who leave content on sites the ability to link to Power.com, which, along with today's public announcement, should boost the site's popularity virally. It should also give Power a better chance to escape the fate of MyLifeBrand, ProfileLinker or the other social inter-networking sites that never managed the viral growth Power.com has so far managed to sustain.

The privately held company is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro but says it plans to open offices this month in San Francisco, Calif., and Hyderabad, India. The company recently raised $5 million in venture financing from Silicon Valley-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Steve Vachani, CEO of Power.com, plans to hold four live webinars to demo the company's services today and tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST and at 4 p.m. PST.

While Power.com may not help SMBs decide which social networking site is best suited to their business, it hopes users who belong to one or more social networking sites (49 million people do) will turn to Power to help better manage their contacts. Because a constant level of dedication is critical to an SMB's success with social media, a Web site which offers midmarket businesses a location to view multiple site and inter-network may be the ticket for SMBs that have their marketing strategy tied to the ever-expanding world of online social media.