The Gong Show

When Read/Write Web reported on the recent death of Pluck, Richard MacManus stated quite bluntly in the title: “RSS Readers a Dead Market Now.” Richard MacManus elaborated on this point in the body:

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.

I completely agree that RSS aggregators are becoming commodities (or as I prefer to describe them: features). But, I disagree that the market it dead. I think it means that increased competition without innovation has created a logjam. Some aggregators will die off, some will stay in capital-efficient cruise control, and others will evolve. I could see a new entry into the field with interesting innovations disrupt market leaders. The market is not dead.

For example, as Outlook and IE7 integrate RSS in the coming months, a new wave of not-so-tech-saavy users will re-experience RSS in a whole new way. I don’t know if the user experience will be substantially better or worse, but it will require RSS aggregators to change an adapt to people’s new expectations when they click on a little orange RSS feed link. This disruption in user experience will generate new opportunities (and close off old opportunities) in the RSS aggregation market. It will be interesting to say the least.

I don’t think there has been much innovation in the field since Bloglines sold to Ask. Rojo hinted at the notion of WeMedia meets RSS Aggretation, but it was a half-baked. I would love to see a richer approach to social media meets RSS aggregation.

I suspect an aggregator that could solve the following problems could create significant traction:

• Existing aggregators require explicit updates and maintenance. I would like to see an aggregator that silos feeds I don’t read and recommends feeds I should be reading with as little work on my behalf as possible.
• Existing aggretaors have no concept of interestingness. This must be a solvable problem given that Flickr figured it out for photos using metrics like comments, pageviews, inbound links, and number of people who listed a given picture as a favorite. All those same metrics are available for blog posts, so and aggregator should leverage that and develop interestingness for blog posts.
• Existing aggregators organize by blog and by post. Why no organize by meme? Some kind of techmeme/aggregator mashup would be interesting because that’s typically how I use my aggregator: to search for memes, which span across multiple blogs I like. Make finding blog-crossing memes easier.

The RSS aggregator market is not dead until the existing players (or new entries) start experimenting with new ideas like these and still fail.