Missing an Old Friend: Have you ever googled an old friend? Maybe someone from high school or college just to see what they are up to? I have. I have an old friend from my youth that I google from time to time. It is amazing, the first time that I did it I couldn't find squat. Recently I found out how fast his kids swam in a meet at the same swim club where I learned to swim. That was kind of neat.
Today I googled an old friend, well not so old. The friend was PointCast, a terrific software program that died in 1999. For those of you too young to the web to remember it was a screensaver that had a live news feed built in. When your computer went into screensaver mode the news would appear on your screen. You could program your favorite stocks to see if you were making or losing money. It would give you the box scores of your favorite teams. It had a really great weather interface that would even show a live radar feed. Of course the best part was having the news refreshing on your screen whenever the computer went idle.
For the folks at PointCast this was a huge money maker because the bottom of the news feeds had advertisements. They once sat with Rupert Murdoch and company on a $500m deal, but they didn't take it. The company was sold a few years later for $20m and is non-existent today. But, it was a fantastic concept and I am really surprised that no one else has taped into it.
Well, welcome to the new web. With the advent of the ubiqutous blogs and RSS feeds there are apparently some pretty neat tools out there to do this. I think that I will give it a shot in the coming days. Sounds like a fun Saturday project.
Today I googled an old friend, well not so old. The friend was PointCast, a terrific software program that died in 1999. For those of you too young to the web to remember it was a screensaver that had a live news feed built in. When your computer went into screensaver mode the news would appear on your screen. You could program your favorite stocks to see if you were making or losing money. It would give you the box scores of your favorite teams. It had a really great weather interface that would even show a live radar feed. Of course the best part was having the news refreshing on your screen whenever the computer went idle.
For the folks at PointCast this was a huge money maker because the bottom of the news feeds had advertisements. They once sat with Rupert Murdoch and company on a $500m deal, but they didn't take it. The company was sold a few years later for $20m and is non-existent today. But, it was a fantastic concept and I am really surprised that no one else has taped into it.
Well, welcome to the new web. With the advent of the ubiqutous blogs and RSS feeds there are apparently some pretty neat tools out there to do this. I think that I will give it a shot in the coming days. Sounds like a fun Saturday project.
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