I was delighted with the fresh and slick look of SocialMarker, but as an industrial strength social network and bookmarking automation tool it is just as weak as its competitors.

First, let's look at what they get right:

• Documentation
• Good midrange site support - 28 working sites
• Nice web design

And, unfortunately, the bad stuff:

• No TOS or Privacy Policy
• Spooky monetization scheme
• No workflow

Documentation

I don't know why more people don't do this: documentation on YouTube . It's no subsititute for printed documentation (of which there is none) but it is much much better nothing, which is what you mostly get in this class of automation.

Good Support for Social Sites

While SocialMarker does not support the most sites (that would be Post Toaster) it does support each site as fully as its limited architecture will allow. I was able to walk through all 28 sites and use the register/login/submit buttons where available.

Which is the part the author really got right - they went above the normal "find a URL that direct posts" and got the "/sitename/register.php" and coded it up into their stuff.

Yes, that is 3x as much to break as site owners change filenames to slow down the auto-posting robots - cue Terminator music! And since there is no real commercial business model (see below) you have to worry about support.

Nice Design

I'm not very good at design, but I know a good looking site when I see one - and this is well done. The site is basically one page, and while that makes it look lightweight, it does help the user see what can be done.

Part of what makes the design work is that you have the option of using their service in a "frame" mode. Unfortunately that violates the TOS for a number of sites (Propeller says you may not "frame any portion of Propeller.com", etc).

No Workflow

Despite all the nice design work, the only workflow is a notice that you are on site 7 of 23, or whatever. Which sites? What order? What worked? Who knows.

It is almost counter-productive to offer a consumer 28 choices if they are unable to plan and manage their work. Once again, a critical missing feature.

No TOS or Privacy Policy

Nothing at all. Nada.

Does any of their framing code phone home? The answer is "no" (I looked) but there is nothing to say that that wouldn't be true at a later date. And if they put it in you wouldn't have a leg to stand on because there is no TOS.

Interestingly, that brings us to our next point:

Spooky Monetization Scheme

There is a paypal/donate button (which is nice to see) and a big fat ad for UploadPedia. And another ad for UploadPedia on the frame you work through to go from site-to-site.

Yes, I am sure that framing another site with your ad is a no-no. Ignore that for a minute - I'm just glad to see an attempt to monetize. So I click through.

Hmm, UploadPedia is another free site. Hmm, the TOS does not say that they won't re-use content you upload. Who owns it? Hmm, no idea.

So, I snoop a bit, find out that both SocialMarker (67.228. 29.248) and UploadPedia (67.228.38.58) both use the same registrar and are both hosted on SoftLayer.

Ok, so I am gonna assume they are the same people. And now I'm very spooked by the whole scheme.

Grade: C

This is another service I really wanted to like - it's just pretty, has some documentation, and the author did go to the trouble to make 28 sites work, albeit simply. But they have no TOS, no workflow, and most of all there is that spooky UploadPedia thing going on.

[Check our reviews of EkStreme Socializer and OnlyWire ]

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 .] 

Like many of its bretheren, the Socializer relys on finding a direct post URL to the 50 or so sites that it supports.

For example, to submit to Stumble you click a button which calls the following code:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://ekstreme.com

&taggers&title=Socializer+-+free+automatic+social+bookmark+

submission

Eeek.

Don't panic, the money quote is: "http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=" and everything else is just the icing on the cake.

But, you say, couldn't they change that and break this service?

Yes, and they will, just as soon as people start using it hard and posting the wrong stuff in the right places. (Or vice versa, the English, she is not clear to me.)

Some of the other things that strike me about this serivce are:

• It lacks any way to keep track of what you've done
• It offers the ability to post information to inappropriate places
• It has no TOS
• There is no monetization

What Have I Done?

The workflow is horrible. You have a page full of icons, you click one, it opens a new tab/window and launches you into, say, furl, and you login, post, etc. Then you close the window and come back and you were, where, exactly in the process?

Posting Inappropriately

I'm going to go out on a very wide and stable limb here and say that nothing any of us create should be on citeulike. My wife has papers there as a result of 10 years of research. I can promise you - there ain't no click throughs into our world.

No TOS

I have no idea what our rules of engagement are here. I can't even figure out how to contact the owner. That is not comfort making.

No Monetization

There are some half-hearted ads here and there, but nothing even remotly John Chow-ish. Which makes me wonder when this will all disappear, because it does require support. (Hey, dude, your link to MesFaves is down. Still.)

GRADE: B C

It contains the ability to post to inappropriate places, has at least one broken post service, and gives you no work tracking ability. That is pretty much par for the course, but it is at best a "B." so it gets a C. [Update. I re-read this review and the reviews of the other minor tools and decided I was grading on a "everybody gets a trophy" scale. Which doesn't help anyone. So I changed the grade.]

(If you enjoyed this review, read our reviews of OnlyWire, SocialPoster , and SocialMarker.)

Today's 400 point drop in the DJIA in the first three minutes of trading may be a temporary bump or a glimpse of things to come. So far it has recovered most of the loss, but if we're headed into a bear market we could be seeing the end of the Web 2.0 venture capital driven bubble.

Most Venture Capital funded companies think of themselves as cool, new startups that aren't affected by the goings on of Wall Street and huge companies. They live in their own world. How could something as far away as the NYSE affect their small business?

Most people don't realize how connected venture capital is to the health of the stock market.

• A bear market provides an inhospitable environment for an IPO, elminating a key potential exit for the VCs. Admittedly, there hasn't been a good IPO environment in a while, but a bear market won't help.

• A bear market hurts valuations for acquisitions. Big companies, if they have cash available, will pay less when buying the small companies because values are down all over. If your busisness plan is to get a lot of trafic and then sell yourself to Google or Yahoo, you're going to have difficulty when they stop buying or are offering less than the VC put into your company.

• A bear market hurts the ability of other businesses to buy your services. When the market goes down because of a recession, the big companies stop buying. Even if you don't sell to the Global 2000, the chances are your customers do. Or they're the ones getting laid off. Either way, a bear market hurts your ability to grow the business organically. And if you don't have a clear revenue model, you're really in trouble.

• VC Cash Calls threaten failure in a bear market. This is the big one that few people understand. When a venture fund raises money, they're really only gathering committments for funds. When they announce they've raised $200M, they don't have $200M in the bank. They've got $200M worth of committments from individuals and institutions that they can call and get money when they're ready to fund. The problem is that when the market turns south, a lot of these committments become less solid. Since it would be a very bad thing if a VC firm were to make a cash call and have it fail, they tend to call their investors and ask them if they have the funds to invest. If the answer is no, they don't tell anyone. They just stop funding companies. When a VC says "We're keeping our powder dry in this market" what they really mean is "We have no funds available to invest." Deals that would have flown through 3 months ago stop, and perfect deals get denied. Unfortunately, the VCs are all too willing to let you waste time delivering pitches when they know they can't respond. You can also see beauty contests that hit small snags blow up into dead deals.

The big one is the cash call failure. Few people understand it, it's the most insidious, and has the biggest effect on drying up venture capital.

So how does this affect your business? I'd say you're in a world of trouble if:

• You have no revenue mode for your business other than the idea that you're going to bring in a lot of traffic and figure out how to monetize it later or sell to a big company.

• Your revenue model is based upon advertising rates staying the same or growing. When the bubble breaks, a lot of VC money that was propping up the currently high rates for Adwords is going to go away. On the other hand, if your business model involves paying for Adwords, you could see your costs go down.

• You've taken a VC investment that allows them to take control of your company if you don't reach a certain milestones. "The company has stalled in its growth" is a favorite phrase VCs use when replacing the founder CEO with their analyst that needs a job because they don't have more deals to look at and need to trim payroll.

• You've taken a VC investment with the idea that you'll meet certain milestones and get the next round, or even worse, the next traunch. Yes, they can come up with a reason for withholding the next traunch that they've committed to even if you meet the milestones. They know you'll be fighting with decreasing resources and an increasing position of weakness.

• You've got a clear revenue model, but it's based on selling to startups funded with VC money. Take a look at your client list. If it's full of cool, new VC funded startups, it's time to look for new clients. You can calculate their life with their burn rate and the cash on hand, because they probably won't be getting any more. Don't let those invoices drag.

• You have become dependent upon a product or service from a VC funded company. If you've built a business where one of the core functions depends upon a VC funded startup, it's time to reevaluate your vendors. In fact, it's not a smart move to become dependent upon anyone that doesn't have a clear revenue model.

On the other hand, if you're lean and mean and haven't taken VC money and have a clear revenue model, you can do well in a recession. Recessions tend to trim out the slow and bloated, which can be your competition. Look at the companies that survived the first dot-com bubble -- they'll probably survive this one too. And a lot of the 100s of websites that make up the critical mass of Web 2.0 that do absolutely nothing will go away.

It's going to be an interesting ride.

In a previous article on Social Networkng Tools I talked about what I called "very minor productivity enhancers" such as Socializer, Post Toaster, etc. That may have been a bit unfair.

Why unfair?

• They are better than doing nothing or only posting on one site
• They point towards the correct use of social networking sites
• They may provide little return but require little investment

Better Than Doing Nothing

If having a tool, even a poor one, helps you proceed to your goal, then the tool is worth something. Based on that I suspect the "thigh blaster" actually helped thin some thighs.

And the goal is.... putting your content on as many sites as possible where it is appropriate. Don't put an article on your Mac application on a sports pligg site, but you should certainly post it on every general purpose site where they have a "technology" section.

They Point You In The Right Direction

The right direction is simple: best return for your time invested. Period. If using these tools, with all their flaws and frustrations, gets you to think about investment (time) and return (traffic, revenue, PR, SERPS, whatever) then they've provided you an important learning.

If they make you aware that there are social networking sites which may provide better return than the ones you already know about, then that is a pretty good take home too.

And, finally, if they're like a gym membership that is so expensive that you actually go, then maybe the time investment in these tools will get you to post your content in as many places as possible.

Little Investment, Little Return

All these tools are free, relatively easy to use, and may speed you up 10% over using Excel to run your life. Big whoop. But none of them really require a lot of investment to use, so if you are using OnlyWire and decide to switch to Social Poster, well, it probably won't take you fifteen minutes.

My experience in life has been that the more important a tool is, the harder it is to leave. Switch from a PC to a Mac. Ouch. Get rid of your Nokia and get a iPhone. Double ouch. So if you can switch these free tools around so easily, well, they aren't really all that deep.

Still Minor

I would still use the word "minor" because all these tools rely on tricks and convoluted solutions. They either call a URL for direct posting or they frame the site and give you easy copy/paste. They're unsupported and often at least slightly broken. Many have no TOS. They have no obvious business model and no support.

Hopefully none of us would base a key business process on such stuff if we knew of better options.

And they just don't give you very much extra leverage in terms of time saved. Just for grins I had Don choose his favorite and raced him. I used Excel and he used Exstreme Socializer. He was 10% faster (5 minutes).

Which sounds good, but I had a record of what I'd done and which sites were up or down.

And I had a dozen sites that weren't on Exstreme's list. So I went and posted there.

So, over time, I might spend a bit more time than Don but, all other things being equal, I'd pull ahead in the SERPs over time because I did more and had the ability to track where I was actually getting results. (Excel vlookup to traffic logs. Yes, I am much Excel geek!)

Missing the Boat

That last is why this is so darn important. Never bring a spear to a fight where the other side is experimenting with muzzle loaders. (Best bet is to bring an assault rifle, if you can find one.)

If you are only going up against people with NO tools then these minor tools are going to be fine.

The instant you are in a competitive niche then you'll be facing people wtih better tools and you'll lose.

Detailed Reviews Forthcoming

I've spent a LOT of time looking at this batch, so I'll be putting out some detailed reviews of each tool, looking at strengths and weaknesses.

My goal when doing any task is to figure out a way to automate it as much as possible while still getting the maximum possible benefit. So I love tools, even when there is a quality tradeoff. I can sweep my kitchen a lot better than my roomba, but it does an adequate job and saves me an hour a week (minimum) - I will take that tradeoff in a hurry.

When we started looking at social bookmarking and social networking sites for another project, one of the things that really struck me was how hard they were to use as a content provider. You want to wander through piles of "Ron Paul is Better Than Jesus" posts on Reddit or read about "Dog Altzheimers Test Kit" posts on Digg, then that is pretty easy.

You want to start putting out posts like, well, like this one then you get into some work. And I'm not talking content creation - I'm just talking tracking the process of putting a post summary on a half-dozen or more sites a day. Then you miss a day (sick) and you have twice as much work to keep track of. I am organizationally challenged on my best days but this really pushed the limits of my stick-to-itivness.

And if you look past the tippy top sites and figure out that there are niche audiences out there served by hundreds of relatively active social bookmarking and networking sites, well, the problems inherent in using them all get pretty involved pretty quickly.

If you want to skip straight to totally overwhelming, try having different logins for different personas. I'm not talking about sock puppets, but legitimate different logins. If you run a tech site (think anything from Gawker) you will post one kind of article, have a certain friend network, etc. If you also run a site dedicated to Welsh Corgi's, well, that will probably have another login and social network. This, to me, is entirely legitimate. But if you have 2, 3, or more blogs it is overwhelming.

Overwhelming even with post-it-notes, the gateway drug to Excel spreadsheets.

So I started looking for real solutions and tools that were out there in white-hat SEO land and quickly realized that there were a few broad categories.

The examples range from very minor productivity enhancers:

• Ekstreme's Socializer
• OnlyWire
• Social Bookmarker
• Social Poster
• Post Toaster

To semi-automated tools:

• Mass Automation RSS Bookmarker
• Tag and Ping
• Web2Submitter

With full outsourcing efforts available:

• Submit Edge
• Register Everywhere
• Performancing Services

This is obviously not a complete list of all the providers in each pile (I have several hundred bookmarks) but just a sample of some names you might recognize.

Something that might not occur to you is that you can roll your own without writing complex PHP/AJAX/whatever:

• Macro Express
• iMacro
• CoScriper

None of these options are inherently ‘evil' or ‘good' though some have a lot more ability to lean in one direction or another. For example, one could choose a high quality outsourcing company, like Performancing, or you could go find someone who has two pages hosted on GoDaddy and a crew typing furiously in Delhi. You conclude who is more likely to adhere to the social networking and bookmarking site's TOS.

And that is precisely the trick: adhering to the spirit of the TOS.

I'm not a lawyer, I can't tell you if I use digg "legally" when I log in and post my stuff, but I can tell you that I follow the User Interface (UI) and the "normal" screen process and whenever I see a recommendation for behavior I try to consider that like a host asking me to not put my beer down without a coaster. So I think about the TOS as a social contract rather than a legal one. (I just heard a thousand lawyers scream. Cool.)

I think one could take a semi-automated tool like RSS-Bookmarker and use it ‘in the spirit' of the TOS for any site, or one could post cute dog pictures to a Canadian Political Pligg site like Canada Kicks Ass. (Side: they are #1 in the SERPS for "Canada Kicks Ass" - how cool is that?). Same tool, different outcomes.

The "good" or "evil" is in you, not the tools you use.

I'll be writing some posts examining the different categories and talking through what we found and what our conclusions were.

If believe that you shouldn't post your own material, then you won't care about this article. If you spend a week hand-crafting Apple Fanboy-licious posts for the front page of Digg, then move right along, because I got nothing here that will help you.

Let's talk about Drive Thru Social Networking for a minute.

Ok, you're hungry, so you have a few options:

If you recoiled in horror at the notion of posting your content and leaving, then you'll really hate the rest of this article! Because I think that it is just fine to put your content up and move on to your next task.

But, you might say, just posting isn't the proper use of the site. Really? Let's look at the continuum of users:

• Billy Browser visits Reddit once an hour, votes on stuff constantly (some of which he's actually read), has never submitted anything
• Patty Participator scours the internet for Kute Kitty Pix!!!! and posts them to Propeller all the time, plus she reads everything with "knitting" as a tag
• Silky SEO carefully collects a network of friends on Digg and posts things from a variety of sources; strangely enough, his stuff seems to go front page a lot
• Calvin Content writes a daily blogger post on his Corvette restoration and posts them up on Car Space, though that is all he does there

So who is a legitimate user? All of them, obviously. I bet if you polled site owners they'd ask for lots and lots of Patty Participators, but in their hearts they know they need all four. I'd like to ask them how many of the posts Patty reads have been contributed by Silky SEO and Calvin Content - probably a lot of them.

At this point in my rant someone will interrupt me and say that you get better results as a Patty Participator. I say: That depends on what better is to you.

I say that Calvin Content is deeply happy with being a content creator and that what he really wants is for other Corvette nuts to come to his personal blog and settle in for lots of tasty arguments about coil rates and fiberglass repair. Good on him.

We all know Billy Browser is happy. The guys at Reddit would probably be happier if he clicked on a few more ads, but that is not Billy's problem. (In fact, if SEO's clicked on more ads they'd probably be welcomed, rather than hunted like vampires in a bad Cornan flick.)

Silky SEO is trying to attract people to his website to sell them stuff. So what? The only reason that social networking sites stay in business is the hope that someday enough people will click on ads and pay the hosting and Ramen Noodle bill. So, what, the site owners are allowed to be commercial but nobody else? I contend that as long as Silky doesn't violate the TOS then he's morally clear.

How effective is this kind of traffic? It depends - the guys at Mixed Martial Arts did a Digg experiment and got 70K fresh visitors over a few days. They collected less than $50, so not much short term value, but presumably they got good value out of their effort. I'd say that the Silky SEO's at MMA were happy with their results And the post got 5000+ DIGGS so they made a lot of other Billy's and Patties happy too.

So Billy, Patty, Calvin, and Silky are all happy.

Nothing wrong with drive thru social networking, it's all about balance in the population.

Not really, but I am famous among my friends for being able to control the stock market by selling (it goes up) or buying (it goes down). So today I signed up for a month of premium content from SEOMoz and....

Clearly I need to use this newfound power to take Matt's blog down....

All kidding aside, this was a good reminder for me to double-check our hosting company's alerts and make sure that they're pointing at the right cell phones!

I'm hoping this was (a) planned and I missed the notice, or (b) a minor hosting issue!

UPDATE: They're back up! 

I am hoping that most of us are NOT reading email and checking our RSS feeds this Sunday morning, but put hope in one hand and a few bucks in the other and see which buys your lunch.

So I'm going to apologise in advance for what I'm about to do: repost 94 old posts with the correct time/date.

Ouch.

We migrated from one backend blogging system to a new one and, as far as I can tell, there is no way to tell Feedburner to ignore stuff that happened in the past but was (re) posted in the future.

So, time to bite the bullet. At least it's semi-automated.

Everyone loves free, but not me. So when someone came up with a relatively easy to implement product we had two choices:

1. Put it on the post-launch list and get to it in a few months
   
2. Give it away for free now

Well, I don't believe in free, so we'll be 'giving' away this service, but there will be ads on the pages around this service. Not because a few thousand people seeing a page with advertising is going to generate major operating income, but because who can trust anything that is really "free" when there is a cost to provide it?

Not me.

So this service will introduce to our ideas on architecture, automation, and database tracking of activities.

We hope you find it useful.

Watch this space.