Profile - Pluck (For Firefox)

Company: Pluck (For Firefox)

Launch Date: June 13, 2005 (2.0 Beta for Firefox)

What is it?

Pluck has a number of excellent products, including a web based RSS reader that competes with Bloglines, NewsGator and others (see our Bloglines v. Newsgator post) as well as an IE plugin that is very popular.

They’ve also quietly launched a social bookmarking site called Shadows that will have increased functionality added next week.

Pluck has been testing a plugin for Firefox for a couple of months, and released the 2.0 Beta on Wednesday. It has been very well received (over 3,000 downloads so far).

It’s this product, the Firefox 2.0 beta, that is being profiled here.

Quick Summary: Its awesome because it is feature rich and faster than any aggregator I’ve seen. It also seems to update feeds quite fast. I will switch to permanently this from Bloglines as soon as the updated features are launched.

This is a Firefox extension, so the download is quick and, unlike their IE plugin, most of the work is done at the server level. The product is therefore much more like their “web edition” than “Pluck for IE”.

Importing feeds via OPML was a snap. I was able to quickly organize them into folders and generally get set up.

I spoke with Matthew Bookspan at Pluck about the product yesterday (Pluck was also nice enough to offer for us to be a beta tester a month ago but we failed miserably in following up). See Matt’s blog post on the release of the product here.

Matt assures us that those few features that we found lacking are on the bug/feature list to be added soon.

Features:

- Syncronizes feeds automatically accross all Pluck Products
- easy feed import via OPML
- works well with tabbed browsing (open feeds in tabs)
- publish/share folders
- bolds feeds with new content
- choices on RSS feed updates
- seems to run very, very fast
- easy to save posts/clippings
- notification of feed updates – a little toast window above the pluck icon in the status bar:

Upcoming Features:

- show number of subscribers per feed
- show number of unread items within a feed
- check all as “read”
- syncing of read/unread accross Pluck Products (one of the biggest problems in the industry right now)

Additional Screen Shots:

Management:

Dave Panos - Chief Executive Officer (co-founder)
Andrew Busey - Executive Vice President (co-founder)
Link

Investors:

Austin Ventures
Mayfield
Link

Relevant Links:

Pluck Blog, About, New Features, Discussion Forum, Trevor’s Blog, Feed Readers Watch

Tags: Pluck, Firefox, RSS, Atom, RSSReaders, Techcrunch, Web2.0

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 7:52 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.