Headliner: the First Web 2.0 Product

Ah, yes, push:

Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place ... broader and deeper new interfaces for electronic media are being born.

Well, no, actually.

I remember push, and I remember hating it. Because it was intrusive, because it was the TV model, because it was anti-Web. But around the same time, a product came out that many thought was part of the push wave, but was actually so far ahead of its time, that nobody really understood its true significance - myself included.

It was called Headliner, and it came from Lanacom. But whereas all the classic push services - like PointCast - really did stuff news down your throat, Headliner did something slightly different. It went to a site and scraped the news from the Web pages - intelligently. That is, it knew - or could be told - which bits were important - like headlines and text - and which were just guff. The net result was a system that delivered streams of pure content to your desktop, seamlessly and without the bloat of push. A bit like today's newsfeeds, in fact.

I loved Headliner, I now realise, because it was essentially doing the job that Bloglines does for me now: providing me with concentrated newsfeeds, in a consolidated way. It was brilliant and it failed. Not surprisingly, perhaps, because as the first Web 2.0 product, released in 1997, it was a mere eight or nine years too early.