SocialBot
IncanSoft have a reputation for cheap and cheerful software products. Their SocialBot social bookmarking application is no different.
On paper, this application should totally kick butt. It reads like a social media enthusiasts birthday present list: over a thousand built in sites, a website spider engine, spinnable text capabilities, an auto account creator, proxy support, etc.
All for less than $30! Isn’t that amazing?
Well, no actually, it isn’t.
IncanSoft’s SocialBot has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese in a colander.
Lets clear some of this up. Since the vast majority of the built in sites are Pligg/Scuttle based, you are left with slightly over fifty proper bookmarking sites to use, which makes it only slightly better than BookmarkWiz in this area. Of course, you can add more to the Pligg list if you wish, a feature only added recently because Incansoft didn’t bother to update the sites database on a regular basis. And some of the sites on the list are questionable to say the least.
The user interface is good, replicating the style of Office 2007 onwards with the ribbon style bar. This is a good thing because if it looked as uninspiring as Social Submitter, I would have had to burn my computer and smear the molten plastic over my eyes to blind me from ever seeing this software again.
In our experience, SocialBot often claims to have successfully bookmarked sites in its reports… Then when we go and look at the links, they don’t exist. Since when does “page does not exist” mean “successful”?
And then there is the random html that it seems intent on pasting everywhere in the reports, reporting these as successes too. The software reported a 47% success rate, but it actually was less than 8%. I’m not great at maths, but even I can see that this is just utterly wrong.
SocialBot has been in development for over four years. My question is “what have they been doing with all that time”?
Seriously, this is like a car maker offering you all the spec, features and benefits of a BWM or a Mercedes but for the price of a moped. Without any wheels.
And that is what this software lacks: wheels. It doesn’t go anywhere. The links it records don’t exist. The account submissions fail. The spider doesn’t register links.
I’m sure not everyone has had this experience. There are many glowing testimonials for SocialBot, so unless IncanSoft have a team of professional liars writing copy for them, there must be some happy users out there.
But this one isn’t happy. I hate this program and advise you to steer clear of it. The only reason it isn’t any stars at all is because it did actually post some bookmarks. Somewhere on a ditch-water bookmarking site on the outskirts of the internet.
My dad used to have a saying which I think applies quite aptly to SocialBot:
If you buy it cheap, you will spend your cash twice.
