EP Diary Forum

Push technology: Friend or Foe

All this talk of push technology has my head spinning. At first it sounds wonderful....news, stocks, sports, information, etc....automatically sent to my computer right when it happens. At any time i may recieve up to date news so I to can be "digitized" and "wired". But what does push technology really do? Personally it seems to be a big monopoly on my time. Its simple to subscribe to a service such as pointcast and find yourself reading for hours all the information your sent and browsing the things that interest me. But does it not take the fun out of it? What about the experience of surfing around the web?...what of that? My browser has several bookmarks and at anytime i can hit CNN, Eschwab, ESPN and many others to get whatever I am interested in. To me push technology is similiar to AOL and other commercial on-line services stratagy....lets create content, no matter how bad, and lets keep everyone here reading it and spending money. I am afraid to think of how push technology oversimplyfies the web experience. What of those small web zines that actually have interesting and human like content such as this one? What will become of them when the time of a surfer is limited or thier thoughts become so narrow minded they no longer surf at all...they just let the information be sent to them. I had a friend once. I asked him, "So do you surf the web...check stuff out." He said,"ya all the time...AOL has alot of great information to check out." The poor guy had never even been on the web in its true form. Sure AOL may have refrenced him to a web page or two but the majority of the time he wallowed in the shameless self advertising of those "content providers" of AOL. Does this make sense to anyone or does the thought of someone else sending you the information they choose go against every idea the web was built on?

Drasnia Yet another web developer "When will message boards get spellcheck?"