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Pluck Launches New Community Search and Blogging Service


WEBWIRE

Shadows.com Provides a “People’s View” of Search and the Web.

New York — October 17, 2005 — At the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit (www.blogonevent.com/blogon2005), Pluck™ Corp. unveiled Shadows™ 1.0 (www.shadows.com), a new community-based search and blogging service. Shadows provides a people’s view of search and a way to interact on blogs that exist behind each and every web page on the Internet. With Shadows, users can move beyond simple search to a new phase of discovery, linking people to information based on the collective views of the online community.

As they exist today, search engines like Google and Yahoo do a good job helping users find search terms on web pages and blogs based on algorithms. Yet they don’t reflect what the collective community of web users finds useful. Similarly, blogging tools like Typepad and Wordpress are excellent personal publishing platforms. But they create islands of information that are disconnected from the object of their posts. Shadows provides a new twist on search and blogging by connecting people to web pages the community finds valuable and facilitating an open conversation that is linked to any page on the web.

“Connecting consumer opinions to every web page on the Internet and then allowing others to search in this vast community is likely to have a far reaching impact on the way we discover, disseminate and react to information online,” said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the BlogOn executive conference. “Shadows is a powerful new service that takes today’s notions of search, blogging and community to a new level.”

Key features available in Shadows 1.0 include:

- Shadow Pages: Creates a community blog behind every page on the web, thereby enabling users to easily discover points of view, find related information and participate in the conversation. While viewing any web page, a user clicks a button in their browser and is instantly transported to a Shadow Page where they can post their thoughts and see comments, ratings, tags, related pages, people, and site-level summaries. This feature channels the power of blogging out to the point of context — the very place where people are browsing source information.

- Community Search: Harnesses the collective actions and ideas of web users to provide a powerful new approach to discovering relevant information. The Shadows community is actively tagging, rating and commenting on pages they come across on the web. When visitors search Shadows their answers come from that collective pool of information, benefiting from what others find valuable and true, rather than link-based algorithms.

- Developer APIs: A comprehensive Application Programming Interface (API) makes it easy for third party developers to integrate Shadows services into websites and build new components that extend Shadows’ functionality. Using the Shadows API, applications built for social bookmarking sites like del.ici.ous can be ported to Shadows within a few minutes.
“In life, it’s clear that our best sources of advice, information, and entertainment are the people we meet along the way.” said Dave Panos, co-founder and CEO of Pluck Corp. “Shadows reconnects us with this natural order — putting us in touch with the people that are powering the web — moving past our exclusive reliance on algorithmic search.”

Shadows 1.0 is now available. The free web site is located at www.shadows.com. Optional toolbars and bookmarklets are offered for popular web browsers.

About Pluck Corp.

Pluck Corporation transforms how end-users and Internet publishers consume and create information online. Providing RSS, Blogging and Community Search software and services, Pluck helps its customers leverage the open content model that has emerged as the cornerstone for Web 2.0 services. The privately held company is based in Austin, Texas with funding from Austin Ventures and Mayfield. More information on Pluck offerings can be found at www.pluck.com.

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Pluck is a trademark of Pluck Corp. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.



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