Editor’s Note: Today is Social Bookmarking day, with profiles of Simpy and now Shadows. Simpy went out on TechCrunch today because they’ve been releasing new functionality that we really like. Shadows has only been out for a couple of weeks, and will make a public appearance at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford this week (say hello to me if you are there), and so we thought it was the right time to profile them as well.
Service: Shadows
Launched: Two weeks ago
Located: Austin, TX (this is a Pluck company)
What is it?
Pluck is up to something, and we like it. Last week they released version 2.0 of their Firefox extension (see our profile), which we are still drooling over (it’s fast). Two weeks ago they very quietly launched Shadows, which is a social bookmarking site. Our understanding from Dave Panos, their CEO, and Andrew Busey, the co-founder, is that they will be publicly announcing Shadows this week at AlwaysOn in Stanford.
As we mentioned with Simpy, Shadows should be compared to other social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0, and others.
Shadows has a single drawback: they absolutely require an IE or firefox toolbar installation in order to bookmark pages on the fly. This takes up valuable screen real estate and is generally annoying.
However, the functionality more than makes up for the real estate loss – this is a toolbar we are going to keep, and there’s a good reason. Not only does the toolbar allow saving and tagging of pages, but it also allows you to view a “shadow page” of the current URI. The shadow page shows tags added by users, comments and other meta-data, which is very useful. Here is content from the shadow page for Techcrunch (which is somewhat biased since as of now we are the only user to have added meta-data for Techcrunch:-)):
Shadows seems to have all of the high end functionality of the other social bookmarking services (with the exception of a server cache of the site?). One thing we haven’t figured out – there is an ability to add friends but we don’t know what functionality comes with adding friends since users set bookmars as either public or private. We like the delicious and furl-like popup up when bookmarking a page:
They also have shadow pages, as mentioned above, and a nifty feature called “ubertags“, which are pre-defined tags like experts, cool, etc., many of which we have attributed to TechCrunch, of course.
Overall, Shadows is very cool and we look forward to the official launch.
Management:
Dave Panos – Chief Executive Officer (co-founder)
Andrew Busey – Executive Vice President (co-founder)
Link
Investors:
Austin Ventures
Mayfield
Link
Relevant Links:
FAQ, SurfersSurf, Texas Venture Capital Blog, Somewhat Frank
Tags: shadows, delicious, del.icio.us, simpy, furl, socialbookmarking, socialbookmarks, bookmarks, techcrunch, web2.0, rss, pluck
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