In December, Facebook blocked Power.com, a site that links members’ social-networking accounts, from accessing Facebook profiles. It also sued the company, accusing it of trademark and copyright violations.

Power.com countersued Facebook in July. Its founder, Steve Vachani, has noted that sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Google’s (GOOG) Orkut enable access from Power.com and said at the time that his suit was “about users’ control of their data.” It brought on as legal counsel Scott Bursor, who fought Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Sprint (S) in early-termination-fee disputes.

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Power.com bills itself as a “social inter-networking site,” in which users can sign on to their other social accounts, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. It has some 8 million users.

That list once included Facebook. But the popular Palo Alto, Calif., site, which has more than 200 million active users, blocked Power.com and sued it late last year, accusing it of copyright and trademark violations.

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Brokaw had pretty good info. Meebo users are now able to work with Facebook accounts again. Here’s CEO Seth Sternberg’s message to his users:

Good news!

Facebook Chat is back.

In my last blog post (linked), I told you we were removing Facebook for a little while in order to incorporate a new way of connecting to their network.

After some hard work from the folks here at Meebo and help from a whole host of people at Facebook, we now have Facebook back in Meebo.

Plus, Meebo is now the first launch partner of the ‘alpha’ version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration. That’s pretty cool.

The method for connecting is slightly different than the other networks on Meebo, but it works basically the same way. You can login to Facebook from the front page or, if you have a Meebo account, login with your Meebo username and add Facebook as a network account from inside Meebo.

Thanks for your patience while we were getting Facebook up and running again.

We hope this helps you keep in touch with all your Facebook friends!”

Last week Mark Zuckberg’s company sued Power.com, a social network aggregator, because the company allowed Facebook users to plug into the site without actually visiting Facebook itself. Today, instant-messaging aggregator Meebo is unplugging itself from Facebook.

No idea if legal threats were brought up in this case, but the parallel seems pretty clear: Facebook will offer outside sites access to its user base, but only on its own terms.

In both cases, Facebook wanted the would-be partner sites to use its recently launched Facebook Connect service. Last week, Power.com founder Steve Vacahni told me that he and Facebook had “resolved” their issues, and that Facebook’s lawyers had told him the suit would be dropped shortly. But as far as I know Facebook has yet to withdraw its complaint.

Which has probably served as an effective warning for Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg, who sent out this memo to his users tonight:

Hi Meebo,

Got some bad news. :(

As a bunch of you already know (because you’ve been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they’d like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said ‘okay.’

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo ‘really, really soon.’

Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!

Seth

P.S. Meebo grew in December. We reached close to 45 million people, a new record, including 2.5 million via Meebo Community IM. So it’s not all bad news… :)”

Update — here’s comment from Facebook:

We are excited to be working with Meebo to implement Facebook Chat using Facebook Connect. Their current integration was launched without meeting the policies we have in place to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained when they interact with their Facebook friends around the Web.

We announced our plans to open Facebook Chat to third-party Websites in 2008 and are working closely with Meebo to create a great experience for Facebook users that use their service.