Pluck RSS Reader

Richard McManus offers these observations about the market forces leading to Pluck's announcment that they would be shutting down their consumer RSS reader. Note that the company is continuing its pushinto professional media tools of various kinds.

I'm afraid to say that consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless - the real business is white label and enterprise solutions. So Newsgator for example is well positioned. And Bloglines and Rojo both got out while the going was still good, via acquisitions. Although it must be said that niche RSS Readers will still have their place - for example FeedDemon (owned by Newsgator) will continue to get an adequate number of subscriptions.

But as a standalone company, it's no longer possible. Consumer RSS Readers are a dead market now.

I don't know why Richard is "afraid" to say it. The market is rapidly maturing for a class of pretty uninspired RSS readers. The ones with staying power will likely be those that incorporate the most compelling social dimension to the service, not just integration into Outlook, or other functional stuff.

I am still waiting for someone to come to their senses in this market, and appropriately offer an RSS tool that allows me to see what the most important people in my life are reading, and what they think of it. Where is my Nerdvana client?

tags: rss+readers, pluck, richard+mcmanus, nerdvana, rss, rss+feeds, feeds, feed+readers, bloglines, rojo

Comments

[Simon]

Stowe,

Feeds 2.0 rss reader (www.feeds2.com) has saved my life! This reader is amazing. I've never seen before so many advanced features integrated in a single rss application. Feeds 2.0 filters rss posts from my subscriptions according to my reading history and it...really works!

Plus it offers recommendations, memetracking (clustering related items), visualization, searchable real-time generated tag clouds, user profiling, and more.

Check them out.