Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Rojo acquired and feed reader startups

Liz Gannes and Niall Kennedy report that Rojo Networks, a social feed reader, has been acquired by Six Apart, a blogging startup.

Liz points out that "there are getting to be fewer and fewer RSS reader companies."

With the entry of the giants -- Google's Google Reader, Yahoo's My Yahoo, Microsoft's Live.com, Mozilla's Firefox, and Ask's Bloglines -- this is not surprising. There is no room for little guys when the big players come in, not unless the product is unusual and well differentiated.

I have long expected the same thing happen to vanilla blog search, but I have been surprised by how well Technorati has done against competition from Google Blog Search and Ask's blog search. Things may heat up more when Microsoft and Yahoo fully launch their blog search products.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greg - I don't know if you can actually call Six Apart a "startup" any more - they where there in the early days of blogging. In fact, MoveableType was really a pretty cool application (PHP based), along with Grey Matter (CGI based), and of course Blogger was there too (online based).

Greg Linden said...

Good point, Arnie. Probably not a startup anymore.