When the first Pointcast hit the Web in early 1996 it was somewhat of a revolutionary moment. Many users knew it was good, but weren't aware of the stakes involved with its release. Pointcast really heralded the Push movement, or perhaps more appropriately, predicted the Push movement and moved to utilise it before anyone else even thought of real-time content providing.
With the release of Pointcast's version 2.01 we can see how the product has not so much changed, but refined itself. The interface is not too dissimilar to the first iteration, but beneath the 10 Meg or so of code is where the real changes are.
The product is smoother, faster and much more intuitive to use, and offers a wide variety of customisable features. In many ways it really is a push-specific Web browser. In one of the later versions I can pretty much guarantee there will be features like E-mail, videoconferencing, faxing etc. This is the whole crux of the new push movement - to provide everything you could possibly need in the one interface.
Pointcast offers a wide variety of 'real time' news feeds, stories and articles on everything from sport, entertainment, computers, weather and lifestyle. Essentially, it is the next generation of newspapers. That's right, it's a tough (not to mention ambitious) call but this is the future of information. Once you've downloaded Pointcast and installed it, it will use your online connection to download the latest news in whatever areas you've specified, and display them to you on your desktop. You can also link Pointcast to your browser and use it to look further into stories that you may find interesting.
This is the idea behind Microsoft's Active Desktop (check out the MyDesktop review), that it provide customisable, up-to-date news on your desktop, along with various advertising, which will probably be linked to your news preferences. While most users don't have the bandwidth to fully utilise Pointcast's ultimate potential, in the future you'll be able to get things like live feed video newsreels and videoconferencing.
So much for Pointcast's idealogy and future - what of the present? As a functional tool for Internet users, Pointcast is definitely worth a look. It really simplifies the news-gathering process most involved Web-users find themselves having to go through each day just to stay in touch with the latest technology trends. On top of this it also offers a great selection of other news covering lifestyles, sports etc. One of the more interesting features is the PCN screensaver. An idea which sounds and looks great, but one which I found myself questioning. After all, if you leave your computer for 15 minutes and the screensaver activates, displaying the latest news, stock prices and headlines…who's going to see it? What's more who's going to sit and watch a screensaver for any length of time when they could be working?
This was one of the dilemmas faced by large corporations when Pointcast was first released. So many workstations installed PCN that when they all went to update themselves entire company networks were reduced to a crawl. This led to a ban on PCN in many companies, a move which prompted the release of a server solution for large networks.
The newest version of Pointcast is ideal for home users, however. It takes the My Yahoo concept and moves it into the next realm of service providing. If you've tried the other news services and found their services either too expensive or lacking in whatever regard, then get Pointcast. It's free and with a little bit of fine tuning can really offer you all the information you'd otherwise have to spend hours looking for. It hasn't quite prompted me to un-subscribe from my E-mail newsletters just yet, but maybe that's just me and my need to have as much news as possible. At the moment the only downfall I can see in Pointcast is not technical, it's personal. And that is that it is too obtrusive. I don't like software which betrays my trust, and after all I invited the application onto my hard drive - it is a guest. I resent those applications which try to wrap themselves around my operating system and make themselves indispensable (or indiposeable). Pointcast initially sits on your display, and updates itself when it wants, activates the screensaver whenever it feels like it, and when I turn off the main display it promptly creates a taskbar-like application, only larger and uglier, to sit at the bottom of my screen and reel off news stories.
All of these little irritabilities are, however, customisable. Once you can turn them off then you're back in control, turning on PCN when you want, updating when you feel like it, and reading the news that you find interesting. Following on from this, one of the features I think should not be overlooked is the ability to place your favourite Website into the PCN display. This was something I liked in the Active Desktop and should be included in a product of PointCast's calibre. Then again that could lead to problems of mammoth proportions, seeing as PCN has made content deals with ZDNet, CNN and Microsoft. Would they really be stupid enough to go through the whole partnership process only to have someone like me use PCN to check out the latest version of Netscape?
For more information on Pointcast, go to their site.
