Solo Technology

Since I was over at the Pluck.com site earlier today (hint: BlogBurst), I decided to finally break down and take a closer look at Shadows. This is pluck’s entry into the Social Bookmarking competition and, at first blush, has some intriguing features. First, the obligatory elevator pitch:

Shadows is a social bookmarking service for discovering, sharing and managing information on the web. Shadows supercharges this information with a “Shadow Page” — a community blog for any web page that includes views, ratings, tags, and comments by you, your friends and the Shadows community.

Now, the piece that jumped out at me was the bit about the “Shadow Page”. Those two words are what sucked me in. Want to know how badly I was sucked in? Not only did I immediately sign up (free, natch) I also installed the darned toolbar! Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of tool bars for site specific stuff, but I was just too giddy to reign it in. Number one reason for grabbing the tool bar? The ability to, at any site, click the “Shadow Page” button, of course!

Now, the shadow pages didn’t quite live up to the hype (imho)… first off, when I’m at a site and opt to view it’s shadow page, I get two tabs. Bookmarks and Discussions. Bookmarks is, upon reflection, obvious enough: A list of all the Shadow users who have bookmarked that page. It also lists what tags they used and how/if they rated the site. Discussions, on the other side, isn’t quite as obvious. Because frankly, as near as I can tell, by default it will contain all the folks who bookmarked it with a note of some sort — and those aren’t necessarily comments. In other words, on some sites I’ve had to wade through a lot of noise to find any signal.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think the ability to leave a comment on a “shadow page” is sweet — and seeing the comments that other folks have left is even sweeter. But the presentation is just a wee bit, well, awkward, in my humble opinion.

Importing? Yeah, bookmark files from IE or Firefox or del.icio.us import. *sigh* no other options. I’ll spare you the rant, but suffice it to say we don’t all use del.icio.us. Well ok, I had 20 links or so there from a previous test… but as near as I can tell (after one hour) my import might have failed.

Import aside, I am really more interested in seeing other folk’s comments while still at a site, and for that reason alone I’m still pretty interested in Shadows. Can’t say that I’m jump over to using this as my main bookmark manager though. I’m too used to how BlinkList does things. For instance, when tagging a site, the dialog defaults to showing the tags used on the previous site. No list of tags that others have used and no list of tags I’ve used in the past. Ugh, that’s where I’m just maybe too used to BlinkList, but huge, to me. Then again, I’m using their toolbar; perhaps the bookmarklets behave differently — I haven’t looked at those yet.

Long story short is that I really like the shadow page notion, but I’m not so enamored of the bookmarking aspects. To be fair, they appear to have a lot more social aspects that I haven’t looked into yet. You can easily tag other folks as friends and there are lots of groups to explore. That stuff might be cool too.

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