[cypherpunks]

I am aware of the current opportunities.

I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.

Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.

[keks]

You mean ad filtered RSS/Atom? I assume such a program would be much faster to write these days: have a set of newsfeeds, map() them with a filter function and merge the results.

While the web gets more complex, the tools at hand get better. Much better.