Only a few days after Borthwick posted his description of the stream it was already making waves. Erick Schonfeld, writing in TechCrunch, examined the effect the move to the stream could have on major web sites:

In a sense, he is trying to rationalize his investment strategy. But if he is correct, the shift from pages to ever-widening eddies of information will have a dramatic downstream impact on many Web businesses, especially media businesses. This rising stream has the potential to fundamentally change the contours of media distribution on the Web. Large destination sites like Yahoo and AOL, already weakened as distribution hubs by search and social networks, now face the prospect of becoming completely bypassed.