The past several days weren’t kind ones for Web 2.0 sites starting with the letter “F”:

- Findory, a news/blog content aggregator founded by Amazon.com alumnus Greg Linden, was shuttered toward the end of November.

At least Linden left a note, unlike:

- Feedster, the onetime RSS-feed search engine, which up and disappeared without advanced warning.

From what I understand, Findory was a victim of Linden’s desire to just move on to something else. Whether or not it truly reached the goal of forwarding the personalization of content delivery, as the goodbye note hints, is debatable; my opinion is that if it actually was a success in that space, it would still be online today. As for Feedster, I know that that site was essentially directionless for the past year or more, despite attracting modest amounts of venture capital funding early in its existence.

I don’t think either of these sites presented compelling enough reasons for anyone to use them instead of Google or another heavyweight content aggregator. And if users weren’t loading up the page, there’d be scant reason for advertisers to sign up. (Whether or not they were looking to become ad vehicles is irrelevant — the Web-wide syndication that Google AdSense has achieved makes it hard for a Web-content venture to avoid including an advertising component in its business model.) At least Technorati, for one, has managed to position itself as a valuable source of niche information, i.e. a “blogosphere authority” (even though I think that site’s credibility is pretty shaky). Findory and Feedster didn’t do that consistently enough, and so they’re gone.