When it debuted in 1996, PointCast, a service that pushed the latest news to desktops worldwide, was considered by some the Internet's killer app—until its erratic behavior and gluttony for bandwidth did it in. The service's demise may have turned people off to push technology—or maybe they realized that e-mail was the ultimate push tool—but there were good reasons for the technology's initial appeal. One of PointCast's most enticing features was its information-packed screen saver. Glance over at your PC and rather than seeing flying toasters you saw the latest headlines. The screen saver was so useful that a great way to stay informed was not to work on your PC.

A small start-up called ModeEleven is taking the best of the push screensaver concept. The ModeEleven Broadcast Screensaver System lets anyone create screen saver channels—whether proud parents pushing pictures of the kids to doting grandparents or large publishers sending the day's top article or product reviews. According to ModeEleven, employers are looking at using the product to keep employees apprised of company news and policies.

Each ModeEleven page can contain text, graphics, and even streaming video (fortunately, there's a mute button). The pages can also contain hyperlinks to anywhere on the Web or to a ModeEleven-provided discussion board for the channel.

The company offers four subscription levels for channel producers, from basic Bronze ($4.99 a month), which lets one person create up to 30 active screens for 20 subscribers, to Platinum ($199.99 a month), which allows for 20 producers, 150 screens, and 1,500 subscribers. Channels can be listed in the ModeEleven directory or kept hidden and password-protected or IP-address–restricted.

To create your screen saver, you can either upload photos into one of the canned templates or upload your own screens. High-end producers can use a Web-scraping tool to convert content from their sites into screen-saver pages. Reports are available, so producers can see how many people have viewed specific pages.

Anyone can download the free ModeEleven player, which plugs into Windows' screen-saver system. Once you sign up, you decide which channels to subscribe to, and pages are displayed in semirandom order. There's not a lot of public content yet, although if you've been wondering what former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett's been up to since "Runaround Sue," make sure to sign up for his new band, f8 on its public channel. To keep bandwidth use down, channel updates are pushed down only when the screen saver is in use, and only if the user has recently used the machine.

The ModeEleven Broadcast Screensaver System is a finalist for our annual Technical Excellence Awards (page 94); it makes our PC's downtime more useful and entertaining. Maybe this time around, pushing screens will be more lasting.