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While reading through my RSS feeds this morning, one title caught my eye: “SocialU: One of the Most Obnoxious Apps We’ve Seen in a While (Invites)” by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb. I just loved the fact that he trashes a service, yet has invites to it. Just thought that was excellent.

From his review:

SocialU is a half-baked, condescending, poorly designed, ad-ridden lifestreaming app built in Adobe AIR. We’d refrain from writing about it, but the things we dislike about it seem worth mentioning and with all the frothy clone-like startups flying around on the web, who doesn’t like seeing one that deserves it get a good blog-lashing sometimes?

Marshall doesn’t like socialu, but Doriano Carta of mashable has a different view:

SocialU makes Flock look like an underachiever with all the things it’s trying to accomplish within one interface. Will people like this shotgun approach to social networks and surfing the Web? Judging from the vastly mixed reactions that the aforementioned Flock continues to receive, one must believe that SocialU will suffer the same resistance to mass acceptance. The next question is will they attract sufficient membership and activity to remain in operation and ultimately thrive and succeed? As always, the people, namely YOU, will be the judge of that.

So, how is it? Well, let’s take a look.

The first thing to mention is the fact that socialu was smart in handing out invites to blogs that review them. Though they likely didn’t love the coverage by RWW, giving invites to blogs is an awesome way to get coverage, and actually having branded invite pages is even better:

It’s such a simple thing, but it’s the details. That one little logo makes such a difference. So if you’re listening startups, do this. Target some blogs, give them invites for their readers, and create a blog-specific landing page with that blog’s logo. Trust me, it’s worth the 10 extra minutes of your time.

Step One: The Install

I’m no stranger to Adobe AIR apps. I use twhirl as my twitter client, so I’ve already got AIR up and running. A year ago, trying to explain how to install AIR, then install an app was a nightmare, but it’s much simpler now. So after clicking the giant maroonish button, I was ready to go. Here’s what I saw after installation:

Mmmkay. Pretty standard signup. It makes me wonder why I am doing the signup within the air app rather than at the site itself, but hey, no biggie.

The second thing I notice is that about 1/5 of the screen is dedicated to a rotating ad. I have no problem with ads, it’s just that I have to scroll to see the actual content. Boo. This app has two sizes: huge and gigantic. If you’ve got socialu open, good luck seeing anything behind it.

Okay, so after the registration process, I have $500,000 SD which I can use to send gifts to my nonexistent friends. Ah well, I’ll get there.

When I go to add my networks, I see that socialu has a list of 59 Networks that I can add to my profile. Let’s see how that goes.

Wait, what?

When I click to add a network, I’m not asked to give my username or credentials. Apparently socialu doesn’t aggregate or post to these networks, it just adds a link to other networks on the home page?

And how do I get to the home page? There’s no “home” button in the navigation pane. WTF? I have to go all the way to the bottom of the page (scroll, scroll, scroll) to get to the “my place” link?

And how do I do ANYTHING?

You know what? I’m done.

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Filed under: AIR, Uncategorized, betas, social media