Symphonious

Scoble linked off to Blogwerx' new plagiarism detector today which is awsome publicity for them and in most situations would be a sensational boost to a new or newish product. Unfortunately for Blogwerx, their system is completely non-functional, not even the help button does anything. Nor does the all important, money making upgrade button. There's simply no excuse for releasing software that is this badly broken to the world.

I just hope they didn't pay out the $30000 to speak at Demo or if I were an investor I'd be seriously annoyed at them wasting that much money without having a product ready to actually sell. It sounds like the CEO may have just sidled up to Scoble without paying to do a demo so they may be lucky.

The best I can hope for them is that it only works in IE and thus the problems are just because I'm using Firefox. I've got to assume that Scoble at least saw a brief demo of it doing something or tried it out himself. Besides which, I find it hard to believe that anyone would manage to release an entire product that does absolutely nothing at all.

The company has lost a lot of customers today - I certainly won't bother with them in future as I can't have any confidence that they'll get it right. I'd be feeling pretty bad about myself if I were involved in that company right now.

Hey Scoble,

Your blog ate my comment. Most likely Akismet flagged it as spam incorrectly. I must admit, I'm not comfortable with the design of Akismet - allowing everyone and anyone to decide what is spam and what isn't seems to be asking for trouble. That said, I have taken to using black lists for email recently. In that case though I've been careful about which blacklists I picked and checked that they all had simple systems for getting back off the black list. Akismet doesn't seem to provide any information on how they decide a comment is spam or provide anyway to protest against it.

With all the spam protection stuff I use for comments and for email, I know exactly what tests it's running and can tweak them if I see problems. Akismet doesn't let me do that and that bothers me a lot.