Onlywire is distinguished from its competition in Social Networking Automation in several fundamental ways, none of which are, in my opinion, good.

First the uncontroversial basics:

• They DO have a TOS, which is easily readable
• They DO have a Privacy Policy, ditto on readable
• They support 22 sites, all of which are live
• They are free, with no monetization
• They have no workflow
• They have no activity tracking

And the "heartless" analyst also says:

• The TOS contains a time bomb
• The Privacy policy does too
• The system architecture is wrong
• The service doesn't really work

No Monetization

There are no ads, no premium services, not even a PayPal beg button. Perhaps the inbound links make underpant gnome money, I have no idea. (See my TOS/Privacy comments below for sneaky monetization.)

No Workflow or Tracking

I hate to hammer and yammer on this, but if you're serious about maximizing your use of social bookmarking and networking sites you really need to have some idea what you've put where. And once again, you get nada bupkiss in terms of historical activity on posting.

TOS Timebomb

I read the TOS. Sorry, I know it's geeky and everything, but you should too:

You agree to let OnlyWire bookmark the http://www.onlywire.com site AND the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor site link one time.

Let me sum that up for you: we login to your account and put our link in there. Keep in mind that the TOS also says that any changes in the TOS apply, so they could

• Put as many links as they want in there
• Change your password
• Delete your links

I'm not saying that they WILL do any of those things, but they could.

One thing that was funny in the TOS was:

You agree not "crawl" or "spider" or release any automated software or service to obtain information stored, saved or contained on any web page as part of the Service.

It's pretty amusing that a group that automates logins/postings (thereby going around ads, etc) disallows them on their own site.

Privacy That Opts You In

If I read the TOS, then I probably read the privacy policy too? Yep.

From time to time, NB Tech may contact you via email to notify you of changes to its services, maintenance notifications, information about NB Tech and promotional materials from NB Tech.

Gee, thanks, I'm opted in for SPAM now. Again, I am NOT saying that they will do it just that you've given them the legal right to.

Bad Architecture

OnlyWire, unlike most 'auto bookmarkers' run off their own server. They don't discuss their technical architecture (and it's not really important) but what that means to users is that it would take Yahoo/Delicio about 10 seconds to shut Onlywire down. Ooops.

As I pointed out in my review of Ekstreme , if you don't have much invested in a tool then it's not such a big deal if it dies, but why waste your time? Especially if there are ....

Service Issues

When you signup for OnlyWire you give them your bookmarking logins and passwords (yikes!) so that when you click their bookmarklet it can, in the background, log you in and post.

Great if it works, but does it?

I ran experiments on delicio and furl and in both cases I got success messages on failure. I made up a username/password for BlinkList and OnlyWire said that worked as well.

Now, to be totally fair it did work on delicio when I gave it a good login. But I never got it to bookmark properly on furl. Not a very good hit rate: one broken out of sample of two. It's hard to say what went wrong - it's invisible on their servers and since there is no feedback you could spend a lot of time pounding away for no net value.

Grade: D

I really wanted to like this service because auto-login is so seductive, but it just didn't work reliably - and why put in the time to figure it out when there is no business model? I downgraded it for not supporting very many sites (there are at least 200 working bookmark sites out there). Strangely I upgraded it for having a clear TOS and Privacy policy and then more strongly, downgraded it for having time bombs in both the TOS and Privacy policy.

[If you enjoyed this review, you might want to read our post on Ekstreme Socializer and Social Marker .]