Bloglines Killer? Aren’t we being a bit premature?

Richard MacManus made a statement in a post last week which elicited a lot of very interesting responses: "Competition for Bloglines: We're nearly halfway through 2005 and there's still no heavyweight competition to Bloglines, in the web based RSS aggregator stakes." The comment thread on the post is excellent and interesting, so I won't parrot all that stuff all over again. If you are interested, take a look there. (I especially recommend this response from Michal Migurski.) But here's my question: isn't it way too early to be assuming that there's a 'winner' which has to be unseated? Of course I am a big fan of blogs and RSS, but let's recognize that this is still a tiny phenomenon in the greater world and that there will be many variations and combinations, integrations and disintegrations that will have to be invented. I mean, clearly Bloglines is a first generation web based aggregator. Yes, it's garnered an apparently strong following (within this proportionately tiny phenomenon.) But as you can see the comment thread on Richard's post, there are several teams working on reinventions of the idea of a web based aggregator and any of them may turn out to be the Next Big Thing. Technorati Tags: blog, RSS