Pluck

» see pluck.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The notice went out in late October 2006 and it was unusually blunt for a shutdown note. "All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007." Ten weeks of warning, an instruction to export your subscriptions into somebody else's reader, and a stated reason that amounted to: the browsers are doing this now, for free, and we are not going to win that.

Pluck Corporation had started in Austin in 2003, founded by Dave Panos and Andrew Busey, and by 2005 it was running one of the better-regarded feed readers on the web. Its angle was that a reader should not be a separate destination you visited. It lived in the browser as a sidebar, in Internet Explorer and in Firefox, with a web edition for anyone who wanted their feeds from a machine that was not theirs. In 2005 that was genuinely useful, because syncing subscriptions across two computers was otherwise a manual chore.

The problem showed up almost immediately. Google Reader launched in October 2005, and Internet Explorer 7 arrived the next year with feed handling wired into the browser chrome. Firefox had been shipping live bookmarks since 1.0, and every large portal was bolting an aggregator onto its front page. A standalone reader had to be better than free and better than already-installed, and being a well-built sidebar did not clear that bar.

So Pluck did the thing very few consumer software companies manage: it read the market correctly and left early, while it still had a balance sheet and a team worth buying.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sentence everyone quoted ~

Richard MacManus wrote it up the day the notice appeared under a headline calling consumer RSS readers a dead market, and that framing stuck to the whole category for years afterward. It was early to be saying so. Bloglines was still healthy, Google Reader had not yet become the default, and NewsGator was buying up desktop clients rather than shutting them.

The read was correct about the business and wrong about the behavior. People kept reading by feed for another decade. What they stopped doing was paying for the software.

~ what the company did next ~

The reader was the famous part and the smallest part of the balance sheet. Pluck pivoted into white-label social software for publishers: SiteLife, which gave newspaper sites comments and member profiles, and BlogBurst, which syndicated blog content into media properties. USA Today ran on it. That business was real enough that Demand Media bought Pluck on 3 March 2008, with the price reported at $75 million in cash and later restated closer to $56 million.

Demand Media went on to become Leaf Group and sold Pluck to Sprinklr in February 2015, where it was folded into a social customer-experience suite. The name survived as a line item in three companies' acquisition histories, long after nobody could tell you what it originally did.

~ where this landed from here ~

Pluck's whole run happened in the window when I was at university and TTNet broadband was arriving at home around 2006. That mattered for feeds specifically: on dial-up, following forty sites at once is a fantasy, because the cost of checking is the cost of connecting. On an always-on line it becomes the obvious way to read, which is why the reader wars of 2005 to 2007 were fought in countries that had already finished the broadband transition.

Turkey was finishing it late, and by the time the habit was practical here the answer was a Google product with nothing to install. Pluck's pitch, a piece of software you downloaded and wedged into your browser, was already the old way of doing it before most people in my part of the world ever needed a reader at all.

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