What is it: Scrapboy is a desktop application for Windows that allows users to access and interact with their Facebook, MySpace and orkut profiles.

Download is straightforward, with good instructions. The file is about 7.5 MB.

The sign-on screen is clear, albeit a little, er, kid-centric:

(You’re now providing your Facebook, orkut and/or MySpace sign-on information to a third party. If that’s an issue for you—and it should be—then you might want to think twice before using an app like this. That said, it’s quite common, nowadays, for third party services and apps to do this, so Scrapboy aren’t doing anything too unusual.)

I then started getting errors, including this one, indicating there was something wrong with the script Scrapboy uses to access Facebook’s logon page:

I then got another:

Going back to the Scrapboy app was no good: the buttons were grayed out.

I tried the same thing a couple of times, with the same results. I eventually got this message:

Given that I was pitched this product this morning by a PR firm, I would have thought the product would be more, well, ready.

Verdict: Not ready for matinees, let alone prime time.

Update: 24 hours on, I had another go at running this in response to developer comments. This time I was able to sign in, after an initial error page, indicating that it was probably the changes in the Facebook interface. (Such changes have been in place for several days, however, and I tested the software shortly after receiving the PR pitch, so this should have been tested more thoroughly.)

The point of this website is that the value of a product should reveal itself within 10 minutes, and Scrapbook failed on that score. But even relaxing that rule, initial impressions of the application itself are disappointing: the UI is clunky, too large (and not resizable below a certain dimension, clearly to support ads), does not make good use of the space it does take up, and is hard to navigate:

All in all, a disappointment.