Today I was going through my feeds and came across a post from Mashable! about a new program/startup called SocialU and how Mashable! readers were able to get some beta access to this shiny new toy. So me being attracted to all things shiny immediately went over and downloaded the program and attempted to wrap my head around it.

Initial thoughts? It’s heavy. I’m running a new mac book (blackbook) with the ram maxed, etc and it ran sluggishly. So right off the bat SocialU was starting to strike out. The create account interface was intuitive, I’ll give them that. So I went through the process of creating my account, confirmation and finally access! woohoo. So I then headed to my network area and checked out all the services they “support”. There was no way for me to add my username anywhere on them so how in gods name was I to be found on the networks? On top of that you earn “money” weekly to buy virtual goods with and the system also values your networth. I think I’ll pass on that epeen stroking contest.

Needless to say the UI doesn’t hold up either. It’s ugly. I’m sorry it just is. Being slammed by an entire right side of Ads is ridiculous. There are better ways to insert ads and obviously these folks have no fucking clue how to do it. The interface reminds me of late 90s geoshitties websites. I’m not a fan, can you tell?

I won’t be using this program ever again unless they clean up their act. Quite frankly it was one of the most pretentious and arrogance promoting programs I’ve ever downloaded.

SocialU: It’s all about You…that’s right. It’s all about me uninstalling you.

I’m a huge fan of tech support especially when it’s a company whose product I use. Enter Intense Debate. Now I’ve seen companies use twitter to respond to people making comments about their product. Which, don’t get me wrong is great but I’ve been waiting to see a company take it a step further. Intense Debate does such a thing. On any given day you can see their Support Guru Mike Koenig responding to people about I.D. and their issues as well as comments.

Yes, of course you can email Intense Debate’s support email and they generally respond within 24 hours (which is ok with me), but hey, why not during business hours be able to @mkoenig a quick question and have a response fairly quickly? Now this is not full proof and there might be some instances in which you’ll have to send an email to the team so the proper people can investigate your problem. What I thought was great today was when someone sent Mike a message about how his support email request had not been responded to as of yet, which happens for one reason or another. Mike responded almost immediately with:

@JB_LaunchingPad wow, I apologize for that. You’ll hear from me very shortly… Thanks for your patience.

See? That’s the kind of support I want from a company. Fast, personable, someone who speaks english, someone who is working to keep me as a user. I wish more companies would see Intense Debate as a role model and fashion their support after them.