In a blog post yesterday, Flock’s Mike Dosik announced that they will no longer support the Shadows bookmarking service (Shadows is a product of Pluck) in the upcoming Flock 2.0 release. A number of angry Flock users commented on the post, wanting to know why.
Co-founder Geoffrey Arone stepped in with an explanation:
“Shadows is owned by the Pluck Corporation, who is doing quite well in their core business focused around social media. However, they have decided to de-emphasize the Shadows bookmarks product to focus on their other products.”
This looks to go beyond a simple partnership expiring – Pluck has been phasing out consumer facing products for some time (they announced their RSS reader will be shut down in January 2007) in favor of its new Blogburst publishing platform. In an email exchange this evening, Pluck CEO Dave Panos told me that Blogburst is “getting 100% of our attention” and “we haven’t added any new capabilities [for Shadows] since this Spring.”
That leaves Flock users with just one choice for social bookmarking: del.icio.us. Something tells me they’ll make do somehow.
And Shadows, which we note seems to have a 20 second load time this evening, enters the TechCrunch DeadPool.
More Flock coverage here.