Pluck, one of the early entries among RSS readers, is fading into the sunset. The plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox will be discontinued effective January 7, 2007, according to a notice on the company’s website.
Internet Explorer 7 offers RSS built-in, which supercedes the need for a plugin, and early reports indicate uptake of IE7 is exceeding expectations. The Pluck website notes that the current version of Pluck isn’t usable in IE7 or Firefox 2, and 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.”
Pluck continues to offer other products, such as a “social media suite that leverages community publishing models,” which includes photo galleries, a comment and review application, blogs and forums.
The lesson here-which, of course, has much broader implications-is that technology and the way it’s used do not stand still. The products and the environment they serve evolve and change as the technology becomes more popular. RSS was once a little-known tool that required separate software. Its growing popularity makes its integration into browsers and websites more desirable and logical. The early adopters who liked things the way they were simply have to get over it and understand that their cloistered little world is getting bigger and will undergo change in order to accommodate the different needs of the growing number of newcomers.
Pluck was a plucky little product that served the needs of a lot of RSS consumers, but its day is done.
Hat tip to e-consultancy
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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
