The much anticipated and highly awaited Agloco Toolbar has finally been made pubic for download. Granted that it is only 6 months behind schedule, I must say that there is a sense of shock in the Agloco community as to what the “big boys” have been up to all this time.

—— begin time machine quantuum leap ——

I worked for a company in the 1990’s who was pioneering a high level client/server application to compete with the infamous Bloomberg Terminal in the arena of data dissemintion. The company was one of 11 US Firms to hold a contract with the SEC to do a manual data dump of all SEC filings into our databases for processing. We were working with DEC Unix running on GS140 Supercomputers, Oracle 7 Database for the backend server with an MFC (Windows) client application on the frontend.

I really liked working for that company because it had an intensive core group of well salaried renegade softwre developers. We had all come from a Unix background and were all well aware of the power of using native linux and shell commands to accomplish tasks was essential for speed, relibilty and monitoring in applications. Back in those days, we didn’t use third party or fourth party solutions that were sold as “toolkits” that were really what any good programmer would have in his/her bag of tricks from experience. For example, our “client pull” from the SEC each day, was a one timed data pull (the app had to be synced with the government’s computers or the pull would be denied). The application was written in Python using an old protocol called Kermit to retrieve the data. I hacked the running of all the system scripts into a TCL/TK interface one day when I was bored at work once the system was in place and most of the other original engineers were looking for new contracts because they didn’t wan to stick around through the support phase. While that may seem funny to current PHP/MySQL developers and scripters, the reality is secure protocols have been around since the birth of Unix. So has the ability to manipulate data, regardless of the GUI (Graphical User Interface).

—— end time machine quantuum leap ——-

Now, before I digress further down memory lane, back to Agloco and the newly launched toolbar. Here is my review…

Installation

The installer is an often overlooked aspect of launching a software product and creating the installer is the cycle most software vendors are not prepared for when the time comes. Professionaly, Agloco has provided a very intuitive and industry standard installer. In terms of dollars and sense, installer software starts around $2000 for the license. A lot of software development companies outsource this work for much larger amounts. To distribute an application on such a large scale as Agloco, it is obvious they spent quite a bit of money on this technical phase, otherwise, their biggest critics would be the first to announce that Agloco had used pirated software to create the installer. This is a “technical” stage of software development and is not to be considered in the overall functionality of the product, however Agloco has done a very good job with the installer.

The Software

Initially I was impressed with the look and feel of the Agloco Toolbar. I wasn’t too happy about the fact that it resizes the other windows, which is a Windows developer “no-no”. You NEVER, EVER resize the other windows because it shows that the programmers of this toolbar are focusing on appearance and the ability to grab API “hooks” to the other windows on your desktop. It doesn’t even have to take Spybot or any other spyware application to realize this is BAD. However, the fact that the toolbar doesn’t recoginze your “default” browser (from the registry) and instead calls a cheap API (OnNavigate) function to IE every time a member clicks a link in the Toolbar suggests a novice approach especially considering that the “resizing all windows” code which is freely available from CodeProject has been under debate for years. So, as far as “sinister intentions” operating inside the Agloco Toolbar, it’s highly unlikely, and anythng seen as sinister can be warded off to amateur software development.

The principals of Agloco obviously have a miscomprehension regarding the use of the word “toolbar” in the development community. A “Toolbar” represents a sub-application or plugin to an existing application, in this case, we were to believe Agloco was to be an IE and Firefox plugin or “Toolbar”, such as the Alexa toolbar, Google Toolbar or Yahoo Toolbar. I’m not seeing that, what I’m seeing is an application that looks like it was written by a bunch of teenage hackers with a professional installer that is pulling links from Commission Junction. How anybody is compensated for having this application open on their desktops is a mystery because Agloco is very slight on user documentation. God knows, while they were waiting for the software to be released they could have come up with some sort of user documention.

Weaknesses

What if somebody is surfing on their iPhone ? Agloco is totally useless at that point. It is also useless to the percentage of people who are not using IE or do not have it installed on their computers. Currently, the Agloco Toolbar is using CJ affiliate links. I’m not sure how happy the owners of the CJ affiliate sites are to be receiving the extra useless clicks on their sites that Agloco is delivering at the moment. In this business “targeted hits” is the name of the game. Again, I see Agloco founders floundering with the most basic of conecpts. Had they taken their downtime to encourage members to add their own links for the beta release for testing, they would have had real time, real world experience on how that particular aspect of the software package was to function. Instead, I forsee major problems and issues in the future because of the way this was setup. It was setup from a marketing perspective, to bring the customers in with no product and once we have them, come up with a product. So far, Agloco has failed to meet up to any members expectations or deadlines and I fear they will continue down that road.

One gets the feeling that the creators of Agloco are not listening to the members and are taking a very old school approach to developing a product which is the definite wrong road. Remember that company I mentioned loving to work for? Well, they went out of business and stranded over 60 employees. The reason why they went out of business was that other entities beat them to the punch and solved the client/server, security, spyware issues by going “web-based” instead of application based. Eventually our biggest competitor ended up getting bought out by Yahoo and everyone in that development team were millionaires.

Agloco is trying to reinvent the wheel, but they do have a hell of a marketing team. Then again, attracting people who are looking to make money on the internet is as easy as throwing a piece of london broil in your backyard and waiting for the flies. Honey, forget it. Those flies are attraced to rotting meat.