Personally, I still use Pointcast and AfterDark to get information
pushed to me, but I don't know many other people who do. I also have
the Pager from Yahoo! [CMGi company!] and one day may get around to
installing ICQ [AOL company!] and/or Ding! by Activerse [CMGi
company!], but those are more instant messaging than push -- small
distinction, I know, but one I maintain.
Come to think of it, I don't really even use the "subscribe to a page"
feature in Internet Explorer. I mostly use Pointcast and AfterDark...
...but then an L.A. Times piece this morning by Greg Miller explained to
me that I *do* use push a lot
http://www.latimes.com/HOME/BUSINESS/t000048881.html
only the push I use is mailing lists, from Red Rock Eaters
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
to, of course, FoRK. What's also interesting to me is that the two
biggest commercial mailing list sites are Onelist [CMGi company!]
and Topica, started by Ariel Poler, founder of I/PRO [CMGi company!]
Poler also happens to be on the board of LinkExchange [Microsoft company!]
Regarding email services, CMGi owns a company called Critical Path,
everyone from Hotmail [Microsoft company!] to Yahoo [CMGi company!] to
Excite [AT&T company!] to Infoseek [Disney company!] to Go2Net [Paul
Allen company!] to Lycos [CMGi company!] and Raging Bull [CMGi company!]
is offering free email accounts, and Rohit's favorite Wall Street
arbitrager D.E. Shaw owns 62% of free email service Juno, which went
public this week as JWEB and whose stock price sat in the smallest
trading range I've ever seen for an Internet stock (a week between 11
and 13). (For the record, Rupert Murdoch also owns about 10% of Juno,
so I guess I could call it a [News Corp company!].)
Lest we forget when I'm pointing out all these companies that CMGi owns
a part of, CMGi itself is 5% owned by Microsoft.
Conclusions? The push wars were a great big nothing; mailing lists were
the winner before the push wars, and mailing lists are still the winner
after the push wars. My other conclusion is that all the big players
know this, and probably knew it all along.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
Somebody once asked,
'Could you spare some change for gas,
I need to get myself away from this place...'
I said yep, whatta concept,
I could use a little fuel myself,
And we could all use a little change...
-- Smash Mouth, "All Star"