I have a lot of criticism on the Max's conclusion:

The observation is right, and I think almost everybody in the HN know that.

Now, I don't get the "... event notification model is much more efficient than a poll model, both in programming and in the real world."

Efficient in what terms? energy? because what I am seeing in my micro-internet-world is that the mainstream news/links are more mainstream and the Internet exploration goes to the bottom. I see repetitions of repetitions of repetitions and it feels like TV.

Generalizations... For example is iTunes truly changing the face of the music industry? No, true music collectors, you know the ones that will remember a song for more than a week, seek high quality, both content and file format music elsewhere.

The same will happen to the non-braindead of the internet, sure garbage pushed information will become popular (like a G6) but truly good content will not disappear. It will however become harder to find, but that's a revolution for a later date.

Why would I want to be interrupted? That sounds annoying. I check Twitter and Facebook when I want to see updates. They aren't being "pushed" to me.

Welcome to 1996. Pointcast anyone? Advertisers love the idea, people, not so much.

What is RSS.

Dead, according to certain articles. I still use it daily though...

You could say twitter is a friend-curated RSS feed that actually kind of works.

Twitter isn't a "thing" any more than the telephone network is a "thing", it's a communication medium, and thus has a kajillion different forms.

A tool more frequently only used by professionals. I can't recall a single friend or family member using or even talking about RSS. How about you guys?

Your friends and family use RSS every day.

How so?

I was going to say that it's the pipes of the applications they use, but now I'm thinking I might be wrong. We've stupidly moved to an internet of proprietary APIs.

No mention of the incredibly awesome socket.io?