Relevant tangent, as Goggles initiates a great conversation and it's a great opportunity for us to expose our (related) vision to the HN community for the first time. I hope I'm not too OT and that you don't mind.

--

At Monitoro[0], part of our long term vision is to transform the web into a push model instead of pull as it is currently.

Right now, you go to a search engine and ask it what you want (based on which it builds a profile, trying to guess what you're interested in, hit or miss). This is the pull part.

Our vision is to turn this upside down:

- Specify what you're interested in at a super fine grained level. Can be a color or a price range if it's a product (I want to know about headphones between 70 and 150 in navy blue, that support Bluetooth 5.1). Could be a location (I'm interested about gigs in any of these 5 cities, bands from this list or this set of genres ...). A keyword maybe (news items about company X mentioning Y in region Z, or new law covering chemical X ...)
Any information attribute that exists can be used to filter your interests.

- Receive matching information as it happens (in real time), or at your own agenda (in a digest for example), or any mix and match between the two.

- Most importantly, it would be data first. Contrary to the HTML/JS/CSS heavy internet we live in, only structured data would be pushed to you, and the presentation would be adaptable. Good defaults, ecosystem of presentation layers, or make your own are all possibilities.

Why? You might ask.

- We live in a JIT world. Everything is changing quickly, the impact of these changes is increasing, and chaotic systems/snow balls became more common recently. Our existing information infrastructure is not optimized for that.
You cannot expect people to guess when to look something up and even then it's horribly inefficient.

- You explicitly say what you're interested in. No guess work (profiling) is necessary which leads to a better model for privacy on the internet, and the possibility to adopt profiles (groups of interests) that are separate from your identity and from each other as well.

- Tying data to presentation (websites) is what led to this situation in the first place, where websites are silos that you cannot easily interact programmatically with. Many websites have no issue policy-wise with this, yet the very nature of the technology makes it hardly tractable.

- Another pattern is the explosion of endpoints and devices, and most importantly contexts. Voice, mobile, wearables (so many subcategories in it), digital signage, but also video streams, radio channels ...
Each of these media not only has different presentation requirements, but separate interaction contexts. How do you expect content publishers and information providers to adapt to this?

It's a classical MxN problem which can be partially addressed by reducing information from websites to data, and then providing different presentation layers adapted for the medium and the context.

You might want to ask Alexa is a new shoe matches your interests, while you want the newest NFT collections to arrive as a daily digest.
You also want to archive news about your school's alumni in a spreadsheet somewhere to check whenever you want to.

tl;dr: Instant information that is relevant, in the medium and context where it is relevant, no tracking involved. (Efficient markets hypothesis here we come!)

Thank you for reading and again, sorry for the tangential hijack. I will expand on our vision in a separate place if there is interest.

PS: what about subscriptions, follows, newsletters? They're great validations of this model! But they're too fragmented ultimately and suffer from the information silo issue. The new model would comprise these as use cases and liberate this information as well.

[0]: https://monitoro.co