The Pluck RSS Reader is shutting down, according to a message posted on the Pluck website:
"All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line."
Current Pluck users have until 1/5/2007 to export their data into another RSS Reader.
It's interesting they put the following rose-colored spin on why they're exiting the consumer RSS Reader market:
"The good news is that RSS reading capabilities continue to develop across the web. You can get them by default in all of your favorite browsers, and RSS-based news reading capabilities are rapidly being baked into your favorite web sites..."
...ahem, not to mention Microsoft is integrating RSS into Outlook next year, Google will probably have Gmail integration soon, and Yahoo has MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail for feeds.
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.
Trevor Jonas: "To say I now regret recommending Pluck to so many friends, colleagues and everyone within Bite would be an understatement."
Randy Morin: "Pluck was one of the first great RSS readers. It competed for awhile with NewsGator but the entire product-line became very buggy over time. The end of an era. RIP!"
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I personally am a fan of FeedReader. I just wish it had extensions like Mozilla products...Or that Mozilla would begin designing a feedreader.
Posted by: David Mackey | October 27, 2006 10:26 PM
I'm not sure what type of monetization they ever saw. At times building something for users first and worrying about money later works. In this case, it is worthless. The rest of the aggregations will soon go the same way.
Posted by: Jeremy Luebke | October 27, 2006 10:51 PM
Rojo's acquisition was not brilliant either, was more like Tucows - Kiko "deal". True, RSS reader is a commodity now.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 27, 2006 10:58 PM
See the following link for an early GreaseMonkey-enabled look at what could be the Reader/GMail integration:
http://persistent.info/archives/2006/10/13/google-reader-redux
Posted by: Scott Johnson | October 28, 2006 12:26 AM
I hope this means Feedlounge will still stick around.
Posted by: Geof Harries | October 28, 2006 7:15 AM
http://www.anothr.com
Anothr RSS reader based on Skype.
Posted by: AnothrFans | October 28, 2006 9:37 AM
Reading programs were dead before they began because it's just to simple to build in house. The power of web based news readers is not pretty colors and browser integration, but social interactions, accessibility, feed customizations (mixing, filtering) and the opportunity to exploit new distribution mediums. None of those are addressed by IE7.
Posted by: shadilac | October 28, 2006 11:37 AM
Hmm, Shadilac makes some interesting points there - but it's really indicative of Microsoft's take on how "MyIntarweb" should be. Obviously, a de-centralised social model where users interact with each other outside Microsoft's realm isn't going to appeal to Redmond.
Going back on topic, I guess this means goodbye, Netvibes then.
Posted by: Juha | October 28, 2006 2:08 PM
"the real business is white label and enterprise solutions"
No way, these will be features in other enterprise solutions....
Why do you think Microsoft hasn't bought Newsgator??
Posted by: David Henderson | October 31, 2006 6:01 AM
I didn't realise Rojo has been acquired - maybe they'll make it a little better now - it looked promising at first but it never delivered (but maybe I am a little picky about category re-writing when it destroys all the nice category information that I have carefully placed in the feeds I am trying to aggregate ...)
I didn't use Pluck anyhow - I see they recommend Bloglines or Google - I don't use them either ...
Am I the only one who prefers offline reading management of RSS feeds?
When I want my feeds into a browser I can always use RSS Include or Feedburner Buzzboost to give me html ... or (god forbid) even code something myself .. if I intend to do something more with it ..
Is this not just a case of RSS going from "fringe" to "popular" - so all the small companies making money on the edge of the envelope were right - but now have to move onto something else?
Anyway much of my attempts at "news aggregation" have led to nothing but "new aggravation" - especially with online services - and many offline readers are kinda quirky and take too much manual time to set up (which obviates the need of pre-including category:keyword information in the feed to start with) or just strips out that information (Rojo again ..) ..
still - its a lot of fun to play with - but its sad to hear a pioneer has stopped offering their service.
Posted by: drk | October 31, 2006 2:39 PM