Back in August 2004 I wrote about the RSS Reader Pluck and a personal experience I had with them. They didn’t want to associate with adult content and yet they were the RSS reader behind Fark.com, a site that somewhat regularly points to NSFW (Not Safe For Work) sites. Adult webmasters are used to hypocrisy like this, so it wasn’t all that newsworthy to me. The bigger part of the post was the allegation that Fark was giving prominent position to paid links, something which happens frequently in adult Thumbnail Gallery Post (TGP) sites. With the recent excitement swirling around sites like payperpost.com it shows these type discussions are timeless on the web.

Predictably, I’m not surprised to hear some two years later that Pluck is shutting down their RSS Reader:

You have until 1/5/2007 to export your data, after which our servers will be turned off and your data will be deleted. Note that the Pluck RSS readers are not supported for use on the new releases of IE (version 7) and FireFox (version 2).

But I’m not surprised for a different reason than Read/Write Web:

I’m [Editor: is this Richard? Where’s the byline?] 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.

Whether or not this is the sign Read/Write Web thinks that all RSS Aggregators are doomed is a weak hypothesis. Just because Internet Explorer, Outlook or Firefox integrates RSS reading within the browser doesn’t guarantee death for every RSS aggregator. As far as web-based RSS aggregators go, I’ve been very happy with Reblog which runs off your own server and won’t be tied to some third party aggregator cutting default feed deals and inserting ads alongside other feeds. Dare Obasanjo doesn’t seem to be quitting developing RSS Bandit and I’m sure he’s merely one of many small developers who won’t see this Pluck announcement as doom and gloom. And Dare works for Microsoft too. I haven’t seen his I’m scared of Microsoft making my aggregator obsolete post yet. Let me know when that comes, please.

There will continue to be plenty of room for innovation with RSS Aggregators and all this Pluck announcment means is one company is throwing in the towel with their aggregator. They apparently couldn’t figure out how to stay creative and ahead of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla and others.

Guess this also means that Fark, if they haven’t done so already (not subscribed to their feed), will be getting a new service to run their RSS feeds. While the dead pool is claiming another, I don’t think we’re going to see an epidemic in 2007 of smaller RSS aggregators dropping. The uncreative, me too products will fall like they always do. Pluck is going away because they weren’t anything that special, innovative or different. That happens in every niche software sector and it’s definitely not symptomatic of anything but an inferior product, service or both.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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