Along about 1996, “push” technology was the buzz word of the moment. Push technology meant that rather than having to go out to websites to get info, you’d run a client that you would teach what you’re interested in, and that client would register with a server. That server would then push data to the client, and alert you when there was new stuff.
About the only really successful software was Pointcast. I loved it. It got news, cartoons, weather, everything I wanted. Pictures here:
Pointcast was a huge raging success for about 8 months, and then they crashed and burned. Just gone. I was so sad. Push technology was deemed dead, a smoking hulk on the side of the information super highway, never to return.
But it has. It’s called RSS now, and it’s a huge raging success.
Pointcast was hugely commercial, which could very well be a large part of its downfall. RSS is hugely distributed, which you’d THINK would make it harder to take off, since there’s no one place controlling it. Kinda like Open Source, eh? Imagine that.
While one of my co-workers was cleaning out some old computer stuff, he found a pointcast CD. I was highly amused. I think I may have even briefly installed it for nostalgia value.
I’m told that one of Pointcast’s huge drawbacks was that if a bunch of people in a company decided to use it, they would constantly be querying the Pointcast servers, creating much network traffic.
Pointcast took advantage of this by selling Pointcast servers to companies. Those companies that were unwilling to pay for that just had to put up with it.
As an admin, I’d probably just ban the thing if it got bad enough. I wonder if that was part of the problem for it?
While one of my co-workers was cleaning out some old computer stuff, he found a pointcast CD. I was highly amused. I think I may have even briefly installed it for nostalgia value.
I’m told that one of Pointcast’s huge drawbacks was that if a bunch of people in a company decided to use it, they would constantly be querying the Pointcast servers, creating much network traffic.
Pointcast took advantage of this by selling Pointcast servers to companies. Those companies that were unwilling to pay for that just had to put up with it.
As an admin, I’d probably just ban the thing if it got bad enough. I wonder if that was part of the problem for it?