转载自：http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/10/rss-readers-are-dead-long-live-rss.html。

Richard MacManus notes the shutdown of Pluck’s feed reader and says:

Microsoft is integrating RSS into Outlook next year, Google will probably have Gmail integration soon, and Yahoo has MyYahoo and Yahoo Mail for feeds.

Consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless … Bloglines and Rojo both got out while the going was still good, via acquisitions.

Consumer RSS Readers are a dead market now.

This day has long been predicted by many including me. Back in Sept 2004, I said:

RSS is already integrated into Firefox and probably will soon be in Safari, IE, and Mozilla. My Yahoo already has a web-based feed reader in beta; Google and MSN may follow soon.

Will independent feed readers survive the entry of these giants?

But all is not lost. As I said in my earlier post, “RSS sucks and information overload“, there is hope for those that do more than current generation of feed readers:

The problem is that the current generation of feed readers merely reformat RSS for display. They don’t do anything else, no prioritization, no filtering, no help dealing with the flood of information.

The problem [should be] scaling attention. Readers have limited time. They don’t want information. They want knowledge. Our job is to help them, to help them focus, prioritize, and find what they need.

Next-generation feed readers should help people find knowledge. Cut through the undifferentiated glut of information and find focus. Cut through the noise and discover knowledge.

See also my previous posts, “Getting your grandmother to use RSS” and “A relevance rank for news and weblogs“.