The guys at Novsoft have a supercar price on their Tag Automater - it's $297 and $67/month for maintenance. Wow. Actually, no, I mean it: wow. I believe this is the most expensive tool I've found in the SEO world.

Tag Automater claims to support just 10 sites , which makes the price and the promise of "an Avalanche of Traffic" pretty dubious.

However, the software does support some handy functions:

• Automated user/password creation
• Timed submission of entries
• Pr oxy support
• Demo "Lite" version
  

Missing, unfortunately, are:

• Error reporting
• Workflow
• Activity reporting
• Support for RSS feeds
• Documentation
• Evidence of active maintenance or support
  

Un-Cheesy Videos

Kudos to the Tag and Ping guys for providing almost 10 minutes of video showing how the system works and how to "add new scuttle sites." (I do have to note that the musical accompaniment was straight out of, er, an adult film. It was incongruous to say the least.)

Passenger Pigeons

At one point during the video the author shows how to "find scuttle sites for automated posting" and the google (circa 2006) query showed 2,520 sites. I re-ran the query today and found 279.

I don't believe the others are hiding - I believe they have been taken down because of people hosing identical URL's into them with tools like this.

Is this Evil?

I've written before that tools are just that, tools, and that the evil is in the intent. I think it is unfortunate that the video example shows how to take a single , rotate the tags, and shove it through a scuttle API every few seconds.

Demo Version Unworkable

The company offers a Demo version that works with one social networking site (Furl) and is otherwise full featured. Which is a refreshing change.

I was completely unable to make the demo version work. This may be because it is V0.1. Yes, zero point one. Yikes.

By "not work" I do not mean it didn't run, but that it just didn't run with the features and functionality as described in the marketing literature or as shown in the video examples.

Support

Unlike its competitors, Tag and Ping does have a support site. So I went spelunking around to see if I could find out why the demo version did not work. Of course, I didn't find any answers, but I did notice this:

Sales?

Given that this software has been for sale for almost three years, it is not much of an install base. But most importantly I was dismayed at the "last updated" date of 2006 for the production and demo versions. (Remember, the Demo Version is V0.1!)

I hope that this is not accurate, or if it is, that somehow these people are still shelling our $67/month and getting updates. Because 14 months is a lifetime on the internet.

RSS Support

Probably because the software is quite old there is no support for RSS, so the user has to enter every article to "tag" one at a time. If you can imagine doing this for five blogs with two posts/day.....

And, of course, there is no workflow and there are no reports, so the lack of RSS is a real deal-killer.

Capability Grid

While the product is extremely actionable (it does one thing to 10 sites) and, in the video from 2006 at least, seemed to do it well it ends up in the dreaded first grid spot. The ROI from only 10 sites will be very low, given the cost, driving the product to the left, and the support and breadth issues drive it down the axis toward the origin.

Summary Grade: D-

The lack of site support, the apparent age of the product, the lack of workflow and absence of reporting all would have put this product, if reasonably priced, at a C in my book. But if you multiply all that by the astounding price, the grade goes down dramatically.