I had an early peak at Shadows while it was still in beta, back in July. Shadows is a Pluck product. Last week, Pluck took the beta tag off of Shadows and released v 1.0. Dave Panos, Pluck’s CEO, gave me a walk through of the new functionality last night. Shadows is a social bookmarking site with good features, and all of the expected bells and whistles. But the reason I like it so much is that they’ve come up with a really interesting application for all the bookmark data they collect – shadow pages. If you choose to install their toolbar, you can click on “Shadow Page” from any web page and be redirected to that page’s Shadow Page. This page is a collection of metadata gathered from user bookmarks. For instance, here is the Shadow Page for Apple’s iPod Nano. The Shadow Page includes notes from users who have bookmarked the iPod Nano web page, a tag cloud of tags used to describe the page, users who’ve tagged it, etc. A user can choose to make any bookmark private, but any public bookmarks are included on the Shadow Page. It’s a really unique product and a good twist on social bookmarking. Shadows also has set up groups, like this one for Web 2.0. Links are automatically collected here by users who tag pages with “web2.0″. There is also a tab for a general discussion that any user can participate in. The fact that all of this metadata for websites is being collected is not that interesting. What is interesting is that anyone can access this site metadata (and only that site’s metadata) by simply clicking a button in a toolbar. Shadows has been slowly building up a loyal user base, many of which are interested in highly niche content. An example is this Shadow Page on Harry Potter. An entire community has emerged around this page, with users writing their own Harry Potter fiction, thousands of discussion items, etc. As more groups are formed (and users will soon have the ability to create a group on the fly, based on how they tag a page), more of these microcommunities will sprout, generating lots of page views for Shadows. → Read More

Pluck made TechCrunch a “featured feed” today (Link). For new subscribers (and there have been a bunch – thanks Pluck), we apologize for the slow review day today. We are still recovering from the AlwaysOn conference. Tomorrow’s weekly wrapup will be a great one, though, and we have a ton of great reviews coming up! For those of you looking for the best RSS aggregator on the market, check out Pluck’s new Firefox extension (our profile). And Shadows (our profile), their brand new bookmarking service with the awesome shadow pages functionality was definitely the buzz at AlwaysOn. Thanks Pluck! → Read More

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:-)): Link 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 → Read More