Remember Push technology? I can recall a tonne of articles in our papers how push technology would be the Next Big Thing, but it was always a little vague as to how it would work. From memory, it was described as information you want comes to you, rather than you going and finding it.
The term seemed to die a quick death and I haven’t heard anyone using it for a long time. But reading articles on the term remind me so much of the latest new(ish) trend of subscribing to feeds.
Wikipedia’s entry says:
…a client computer such as a desktop home user would subscribe to various information topics provided by a content provider and as that content is created by the content provider, such information is “pushed” or delivered across the internet to the desktop home user and displayed on that users computer.
The technology first gained popularity in the 1990s using PointCast software. It got a lot of media attention and both Netscape and Microsoft integrated it heavily into their software at the height of the browser wars. However, most people didn’t find push technology useful, and it later faded into more obscure corners of software packages.
Did push technology just shed its name and become reinvented as feeds? I wonder.
Why did push technology fail? Why didn’t people find it useful?
In another article, the flaws of push technology were said to be the difficulty in filtering content to your requirements.
As I subscribe to more and more feeds, I’m wishing I could filter out feed items based on certain key words. I recently discovered FeedShake which does this (do any feedreaders have this functionality inbuilt?). Handy when there’s just too many items to keep up with in a feed. Darren has a good discussion on if bloggers are posting too much in response to Seth’s post entitled “The noisy tragedy of the blog commons”.
As more and more feeds become available, instead of saving us time keeping track of those sites we may lose time with information overload. Memetrackers may help – but I suspect it’s not going to be enough of a solution in and of itself.
The article on push technology from 2000 warned that users may end up with “large quantities of information that must still be reevaluated and digested by the user to determine its true relevance”. So familiar.
As I write this, I’ve discovered a story which connects the dots between push technology and RSS. It explains that while millions downloaded the Pointcast software, it causes network havoc (hmm, RSS requests on the hour crashing servers sounds vaguely familiar) and, interestingly, “boredom set in”. Will people tire of feeds? Will people find it just too much to keep on top of tracking too many sites?
PS It’s funny to read Jeffrey Veen’s push article from 1998:
Listen closely, kids, and I’ll fill you in on the next big thing: Web pages that come to you. That’s right, instead of aimlessly wandering the Net, searching for pages of interest, you’ll get them delivered to you. Just sit back and watch the content stream in. It solves a lot of problems for users – like keeping track of all your favorite sites and remembering to visit them.
Just some thoughts I had while reminscing.
