An interesting point of view on the reversing of the web - from somewhere you go to find stuff (pull) to somewhere that finds stuff for you (push.)

I seem to be seeing a lot of stuff at the moment about the rise of "agents" — now that we are permanently connected to the internet through mobile phones (with the expectation that wearables will be the next shift in increasing connectivity and convenience), the job of "making the internet better" is less about the hardware to get your TCP/IP connection, a browser to render your HTML and a screen to display it on, and more about the tasks that you want to use the internet for.

I keep coming back to Douglas Adams' idea of the electronic monk — in an age of video tape, he talked about the VCR as a device to watch TV for you. Well, Facebooks job is effectively to read your friends' updates and conversations, and then to let you know about what it thinks are the best ones. Sure it used to be about collecting them all together in one place, but the Timeline changed a long time ago from showing you everything to showing you a selection. So the next logical step is from waiting for you to visit and view the timeline to letting you know when something you are going to find interesting has happened. You might already have this set up with alerts to tell you when you've been sent a message, tagged in a photo etc.

I think the view Dries puts forward here — that "the web" will disappear into the background — is an extreme one (in the same way that even though we have digital TV recorders that can series link programmes we want to watch, the idea of the channel isn't going away any time soon), but that there is something important in the central concept of the "push web" that is going to be increasingly important to understand.

Especially if you work in advertising.

Some Random Nerd