Crafty new software

I work for a tech and business magazine and I came across a new product called Shadows the other day. (See my blog here.) It allows you to leave comments on any Web page - be it a restaurant, a blog or a multinational conglomerate. The comments are stored on something called a "Shadow page," which others using the software can see. In other words, you can sound off, a la Muddy-Waters-message-boards style, right on the site of the company you love/hate/wish would go bankrupt already.

There are a bunch of other features, most of which fall under the heading of something called community search (our collective searching helps each other, blah, blah) but it was the Shadow page function that intrigued me. Thought I'd throw it out here so people can check it out if they want. While there aren't a lot of Web-site-having businesses in our little hood, Manhattan is perfect for a neighbor-friendly tool like this. I've already "tagged" Daily Heights. Will be searching for other neighborhood sites and businesses.

www.shadows.com

(PS - I'm using Firefox, which was easier to install than Internet Explorer.)

I hope in the course of doing your research you found out that this idea is as old as the dot-com boom... there were several models of this floating around 2000ish, none of which took off, as far as I know.

As for shadows.com, I still don't "get" what they are trying to do, which doesn't bode well for them. For example, I didn't see your tag to Daily Heights anywhere. I should be able to view their home page and within a few clicks understand exactly what it is and how it works.

I've got the toolbar and I clicked "Shadow Page" and their server just hangs. While I'm waiting, I can recommend that you download Google Earth, run it, activate "Keyhole Community BBS" and prepare to be amazed, because once again, Google has done an idea (geographically-based "shadow" tagging) exactly the right way.

Indeed, I did some gumshoeing (see the original link to the blog, where I mention previous incarnations of such software). The most promising/doomed example was Third Voice, which was got people pretty excited, then disappeared (some behind-the-scenes controversy).

I like this stuff because it puts power in the consumer's hands. Kind of like a clipboard, hanging on a string outside of any business. You don't like the place, leave your opinion for the next guy.

oops, didn't see the link to your blog.

sounds just like stumbleupon.com

rhodamine wrote: sounds just like stumbleupon.com

I'm really liking stumbleupon except it really needs to function or be integrated with a service like del.icio.us. I have to manually post to del.icio.us anything I like from stumbleupon because their link history setup sucks. In a perfect world, clicking the thumbs up would do do both jobs. Normally, I'd stay away from it, but I've actually been introduced to tons of interesting sites (as well as tons of crap) that it's been worthwhile.

Stumbleupon.com looks like another move in the collaborative direction. There's definitely an article in this somewhere - even if it is, as dailyheights suggested, a second-generation article.

Amazon's been doing stuff like this for a while (Listmania, "Customers who bought this also bought...") and Netflix just kicked off a new function called "Friends," which feeds you recommendations based on others' rankings. The math behind the ranking stuff actually sounds like it must be kind of fun - it must be a challenge to aggregate everyone's likes and dislikes, feed them into a program and spit the results back out in a relevant fashion.

Thanks for the Stumbleupon.com rec - I'll try it out.