When I heard that Accenture was releasing an RSS screen saver, I had to give it a try. After all, Accenture is a company that understands the Web better than a lot of other companies, and as a technology consulting firm, I figured they’d release something interesting.

They didn’t. In fact, the disappointments about the screen saver aside, it struck as as very familiar. Then it hit me: This is PointCast all over again.

In case you don’t remember it, PointCast was a free download introduced in 1997 as part of the “push” frenzy. From a company called Marimba, PointCast let you set up news feeds, then view them on a screen saver. Corporate IT departments went nuts dealing with the massive individual downloads to hundreds or thousands of computers; PointCast was banned in some organizations because its bandwidth demands slowed networks to a crawl.

But the infrastructure problems PointCast created aside, it was cool for a while, then got boring. The company sent its last cast in 2000. But at least its advertising was unobtrusive. (Come to think of it, I don’t think there was any advertising, although I don’t remember for sure.) The Accenture screen saver, which is no different except that it uses RSS to grab its feeds, features a screen show of paid spokesman Tiger Woods, action golf shots of whom occupy a hefty portion of the page. On top of that, you can only subscribe to 12 feeds, and one of them has to be Accenture.

I’ve already uninstalled it.