When Push Comes to Shove March 4, 1997 Perhaps you saw the cover of Wired 5.03. You know, the one with the hand. In case you didn't know it yet, push is replacing the Web ... or is it absorbing it, or is it improving it? No matter how you slice it, the "push revolution" is born, whether you're ready or not. What is push? Your guess is as good as mine, but it seems to fall somewhere in between television and Internet mailing lists, depending on who you talk to and what they're trying to convince you of.
One thing most people evangelizing push (or is it Push now?) agree on is that it's going to totally change the way you use the Internet. Along with push comes another resurgent techonology, the "intelligent agent." These agents are supposed to know what you want and then save you the trouble of going out and getting it for yourself.
One very primitive marriage of push/agent technologies is PointCast. If you're the guy who hasn't bothered to download it and try it out at least once, then I'll give you a brief rundown. Basically, you install a rather sizable application on your computer. This application goes out and downloads news and features from services that you select. You can select the News channel, the Horoscope channel, the Wired channel, the CNN channel, etc ... Then, when it thinks you're not around, it connects to PointCast's site and downloads bunches of articles and advertisements for you to absorb.
In addition to allowing you to browse through the channels, PointCast will act as your screen saver, languidly displaying headlines and advertisements on your screen while you're idle (or, your boss hopes, working on other things and ignoring the screen saver). As you can see, PointCast provides the one-two punch of push, it pushes a bunch of articles onto your hard drive, and it pushes headlines onto your screen when you're not supposed to be looking.
I don't think PointCast was what AI experts had in mind when they were talking about intelligent agents. A mechanism for letting you pick your channels isn't any more intelligent than the remote control on your television. And you pay for this lack of sophistication with hard drive space and performance outages while your computer downloads an avalanche of information you didn't want to see in the first place.
Nonetheless, many people who've seen PointCast are hooting like the ape in 2001 after he figured out what that old dry bone was good for. Much like the bone, PointCast is the bludgeon of push technology. The only thing that differentiates it significantly from a mailing list is that it shows commercials all the time. (If you don't believe me, check out Netscape's Inbox Direct, a news delivery service that works via your e-mail client.)
So I'm siding strongly with the what's the point camp and waiting for something a bit more useful. What does Pointcast lack? Intelligence. More specifically, intelligent filtering. For example, if I can choose to have Apple's stock price, or the latest baseball scores pushed to me every thirty minutes, then I'm the intelligent agent (deciding exactly which information I want and when I want it), and push is almost pull. I'm just having something sent to me automatically that I could download myself (in fact I could write a Perl script to do this for me).
Now the question is how do I go about letting an agent do my choosing for me? There are already some agent based sites on the Web, two of the most notable are Affinicast and Firefly. Affinicast asks you to answer a few questions and then gives you a list of sites, and news stories that it believes you would find interesting. Firefly, on the other hand, will choose music or movies for you. You tell it how well you liked a bunch of movies or singers, and it compares your tastes with those of other Firefly members to tell you about some other movies/records that may interest you. By ranking those, you can narrow your tastes, and in the process, help it make recommendations to other members.
The problem that I have with these sites is that they're not conducive to just jumping in and surfing. The agent technology isn't a transparent part of your Web experience. Imagine going to CNN's web site and reading the news. Generally you wouldn't read every single story, instead you read the stories on topics that interest you. Say, in my case, I read all the stories on Apple, all the stories on the Houston Rockets, and some stories on NASDAQ. Wouldn't it be cool if next time I went to the site, stories on those same topics were listed first among the headlines, saving me the trouble of looking for them? To some extent, the Web is like this already, as I could have surfed MacInTouch, the Houston Rockets page at nba.com, and the NASDAQ homepage.
This is an example of how a transparent intelligent agent might work on a website. We can also apply this example to push based media. Perhaps you could have a setting on your browser that said "accept pushed information" (or you could select it on individual websites). Then, if this option is enabled, CNN could send me stories that it thought you would be interested in given the stories that you'd read in the past. If a site began shovelling information to you that you didn't really care about, you could turn the service off, or perhaps go in and tweak the settings. This kind of personalized content aggregation isn't a distant leap forward technologically, and could be a value added service for newspapers that are trying to make it online.
Fine tuned selection and optional delivery of content are where it's at if you want to provide customized information services for the future. Current offerings are better defined as shove than push. Automatic filtering is non-existant, and for that matter, there aren't any options for user-defined filtering in the push arena.
The Web is not television, and while PointCast, BackWeb and their kin are novel developments, having tons of unneeded content shovelled onto your hard drive is hardly a panacea. Push-type technologies have the potential to be a very encalming form of interaction with your computer. Why do people subscribe to "-announce" mailing lists? So they can feel confident that they're going to get the information they want as soon as it's available. That's also the reason why lots of people get the newspaper on their doorstep every morning.
Unfortunately, so much effort has been thrown behind push for an entirely different reason. The fact of the matter is, the push parade is marching around because people finally believe they've found a way to make the web a "profit center". Push aligns the Web better with traditional media outlets in terms of advertising.
With applications like PointCast, content providers can charge based on subscription rates (like a magazine or newspaper), instead of hits or click-throughs. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to a better experience online for viewers.
There are plenty of cool ways to increase interaction with sites and people, some of which can be categorized under the push heading. However, push seems to be one of many overhyped ideas (like VRML) that are more thunder than lightning. Technologies like these are the butter, not the bread in terms of the Internet.
The bread is the thousands of people working to create the content that brings millions of people onto the Web every day. Whether they're a copywriter for CNN, a programmer who puts tutorials and sample code on his homepage, or some chick who happens to like to put her journal on the web, they compell people to fire up Netscape and surf. When it comes down to it, the killer app is the content, not how it winds up on your screen. |
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