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.
Thank goodness! It was the worst I’ve used. When I uploaded my bookmarks to Shadows, it made them all PUBLIC by default! On top of that, they all appeared on the Shadows homepage. Outrageous. I spent the next 3 hours deleting all of them. I couldn’t even find an option to delete my account. del.icio.us makes your uploaded bookmarks private by default. I’m still fuming about the Shadows incident.
This is an excellent move for Flock. Kudos to Will and the gang.
del.icio.us makes your bookmarks private by default?
In fact, I’ve had bad experiences with all of the company’s products. The people at Blogburst were rude, and Pluck lacked basic functionality. Accessing my feeds proved difficult without the Firefox extension.
@ Michael: Yes, the ones you export and upload from your browser.
Shadows has been dying for a while now. I tried getting in touch with their (Pluck) CEO, Dave Panos, and offer their users a new home at Simpy, but got no response. If Dave is reading, please contact me.
Michael:
Yes, they go in as private when uploaded. This is the easiest way to hide spam, which is both good and bad here.
good riddance. shadows screwed 100 of my bookmarks because they dont export your favorites like everyone else
Being highly not subjective, I say GO BLINKLIST. Michael already covered them. And in a good way !
It’s Flock 1.0, not Flock 2.0, what they are releasing
Well in fact they prepare alternatives to shadows:
” – Flock is about choice and we are already looking into adding more bookmarking services such as Wink and ma.gnolia, with the ultimate goal of letting users integrate whatever services they want.” (Flock Blog)
I am sad to Shadows go away as it was a great service for me. I originally used Del.icio.us but there was a lack of functionality (like web snapshots) and a horrible user interface.
As a vocal Flock community member, my concern was the ostercization of Shadows users and the removal of choice. Shadows does not currently offer exporting of favorites and tags. For someone with over 400 links and 1500+ tags, it would be difficult to reinput all the data into another service manually. Fortunately, Flock stepped forward and contacted Shadows to develop a method for transitioning another service. The other concern was for offering choice. While del.icio.us is very effective many users, it is not the best fit for me. Since the awesome integration of favorites is my most used feature in the Flock browser, I was struggling with switching back to del.icio.us or abandoning Flock (which I don’t want to do).
I think a lot of the negative response to the issue stemmed from the original post. While well-intentioned, it lacked any explanation or background information on the matter. It basically stated that Flock would stop supporting the service. Have a good day. After Geoffrey’s post, I believe Flock/Shadows users feel much more comfortable situation with new perspective.
I, too, am hoping that BlinkList will be a supported service in Flock.
Thanks TechCrunch for posting about this subject! Crunch on…
I agree, GO BLINKLIST!
Flock should add http://www.onlywire.com as the bookmarking service – they have an api too. Ive been using it now for several months and it saves me lots of time. Onlywire basically allows you to use a single bookmarklet to save the page to like 15 or more social bookmarking networks. I only participate in 3 but its your choice. Cool service.
I’ve never seen a decent social bookmarking application. Social bookmarking tools have succeeded in making my bookmarks more disorganized. The problem is that Social bookmark companies are looking to suck useful information out of users and get bought out by someone interested in that data. They seem to have little regard for the user. Just look at Delicious. For all the hype it is a pretty horrible application from a usability standpoint. Have you ever tried to delete multiple bookmarks all at once? You can’t do it.
Adam:
For some people hierarchical bookmarks locked up in their browser are best. I agree about usability. Try Simpy for Bulk Edit and Bulk Delete. You can use a read-only demo account (username/password: demo/demo) to sniff around.
John:
Unfortunately, a LOT of spammers and self-promoters are also big fans of OnlyWire. I see them trying to get into Simpy via OnlyWire all the time. I spoke to OnlyWire guy about the spam issue, but it looks like he doesn’t have any spam filters in place yet.
Thanks for the timely post on bookmarking services. I am trying to find an alternative to del.icio.us.
I often bookmark a website and later go back to decide what bundle to place it in. I’ve got LOTS of bookmarks to be categorized.
Unfortunately, as Adam pointed out, the user interface is HORRENDOUS. It is maddeningly slow and you can’t changeor delete items in bulk. And if I export my bookmarks, it appears that I lose all my bundles. Yikes!
Not long ago I wrote yahoo and email commenting on the slowness and the need for a way to bulk edit items. Here’s the response that I got back:
Thank you for writing to del.icio.us Customer Care.
Thank you for your comments and suggestions regarding Yahoo!
del.icio.us.
It is through customer feedback that we are able to continue to make improvements. There is always something on the drawing board, and many of these have come directly from users like you.
In the meantime, a possible fix is to disable some of the applications
that are currently running in your system.
….disable applications??? I already close other apps down when I’m trying to edit in del.icio.us. Maybe I should disable windows too!
Jeezus.
Why didn’t the company sell off these properties instead of simply abandoning them? Or perhaps open source them and receive the positive press?