What is Somiibo? What does it mean? Who is it for, and why should you care? Every Friday we will discuss Somiibo’s development and learn more about the inner workings of this massive project.

Tell Me About Somiibo

In its early days of development, Somiibo was originally designed to be purely an automation platform for SoundCloud. It’s purpose would then, naturally, would be catered to musicians and musicians alone. It was intended to be a tool that would allow one to spend less time marketing by automating the marketing process and thus would give the artist more time to create content.

We came to the realization that SoundCloud, while it may be the primary distribution platform for musicians, is not the only tool a successful artist uses in their marketing toolbox. Musicians still need to utilize Facebook and Instagram as well as Twitter at the very least. Why not include these other platforms within Somiibo? We asked ourselves the same question.

After revisiting Somiibo’s potential, we soon realized that anyone can use Somiibo to streamline their marketing–with all these supported platforms, Somiibo is not limited to musicians. Whether you’re a musician, an artist, a photographer, a small business, or a large firm, everyone needs social media marketing. Somiibo is there to help you when you can’t afford to have a team handle your marketing.

Thus we rebranded our idea and turned this project into a full, package-deal marketing tool that automates many, if not all social media platforms. ‘Somiibo’ actually means ‘Social Media Bot’ in Japanese–no, not really. But it sounds like it, right?

Actually, once you see it, it’s pretty obvious how we came up with the name. So-mii-bo is just actually a three part Portmanteau of the first phone of each word in the phrase ‘Social Media Bot’. That was a mouth-full wasn’t it? In other words, if you take the first sound of each word, you get Soh, Mee, and Boh. With a little magic and clever letter replacements, we combined those sounds to make Somiibo!

What Makes Somiibo Different?

Bots traditionally have a connotation of being ‘sketchy’. Somiibo is designed to not only look user friendly, but also to function just as slick and clean as it appears. Somiibo is incredibly transparent about what it does by literally showing you in front of your eyes instead of being some secret tool that operates behind your back.

On top of that, Somiibo strives to provide everything you need to in a single package. Every platform you need is right at your finger tips. And since Somiibo works just like a browser, you never have to even leave the app to manage your social media accounts. You can do everything right from the Somiibo dashboard.

Somiibo is also a multi-session environment. This means that, if you have multiple accounts on one platform (such as SoundCloud or Twitter), you can open and manage each simultaneously without having to log out.

The Engine

An important part of how any app is going to be created is the engine. We searched around looking at probably 20-30 different app engines from Unity to JavaScript to Java to standalone desktop engines written in like 10 different languages. And we tested each one. We wanted to find something that would offer good performance and not be too complicated. We wanted something that would allow us to write for desktop environments and ideally support mobile as well.

The final decision came down to Electron. Electron works by combining Node.js and Chromium. Electron offers some of the best performance we have ever seen and since it is just the usual Web Technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript), it operates just like a browser. It’s also cross-platform, allowing us to create an awesome automation tool for mac and windows.

Electron is extremely powerful while being easy to use. Once you get used to the development process a little, it saves tons of time. Node.js has a huge array of plugins and tools available on Node Package Manager. I use the Atom text editor to write the actual code because I love Atom’s clean interface and functionality. As the lead developer, I am incredibly excited to start sharing with you, every week, the development process.

Some weeks will be slow, and some weeks will be incredibly feature-packed and juicy. But for now, I will leave you all with a snippet of what the dashboard looks like!

What do you think? We would love to hear your comments below!

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