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.
Other reactions
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!”
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)