No more (FEED)readers?

Pluck RSS reader is going to be discontinued and the commenters agree that it is a sign of the consumer feed readers becoming (or rather already being) commodities, with this space headed to be dominated by the big players.
It is sure that this market is crowded and it’s also clear that acquiring users has been very hard, both for small startups and for big enterprises (see the warm acceptance of the google reader).

I agree that the best opportunities will be in providing white-label reader technology for smaller customer facing sites. I find also extremely interesting the opportunities for aggregation, clustering and filtering solutions for businesses which will enable better use of the knowledge spread through the blogsphere and will allow building smaller specialized bizspheres connecting enterprises with customers and partners (and even competitors).

But on the other side I see this as a market that is still in its infancy, I think that most of the internet users (even those reading blogs daily) barely know what a feed reader is, and don’t use one regularly.

Maybe they won’t need to know, and feed reading will just be another feature of email clients, but the danger is that there will be almost no research or experiments on how to build better feed readers, so the users may be forced into sub-optimal experiences, which in the end will limit the diffusion of blog content.

I expect the solution to come from the bottom, from open source products on the desktop and smaller players on the web which will have the creativity and the ability to challenge the status-quo.

P.S. see here for my views on the RiverOfNews style of readers