One of the first push services was the screensaver Pointcast. The entire idea of having news displayed as a screen saver is a bit odd, since you aren't supposed to be paying close attention when the screensaver is active..
While the browser developers were busy fighting the great war, a number of smaller squirmishes happened behind the scenes. One of them was the VRML standardization process for Virtual Reality (VR) on the web. As of the latest revision of this text (december 2005) VR seems to have returned to the world of gaming. The web is back to 2D.
While the consumer electronics industry turned to the web, producing products like WebTV, the web people started thinking in terms of broadcast media. Alongside the buzzword community the greatest hype on the net for about year (around 1997) was PUSH. With push technology, content providers would put content on your desktop rather than you requesting it. Seems kind of weird in retrospect, but at the time this was really hot.