ush technolog
y, thought of as the next cataclysmic Internet quake, is wrong-headed. While push seemed like a good idea in the beginning, it has turned into a time-wasting, bandwidth-gobbling monster.
Advocates of push technology claimed people could become masters of their destiny by simply signing up. Then, the miracle push agents would go back to the innards of the Internet and work tirelessly, digging through news and files on behalf of their clients.
Some push technology does work well if set up correctly. But all too often, people end up with too much pushed information. Instead of delivering the news we wish to read, these push monsters send more-much more. Sometimes the information sources seem to multiply as if push monsters share lists. It's time to stop the madness!
This push monster won't survive if content providers continue to shove data downward. Either network managers or end users themselves will
cut off the flow-killing a potentially good concept.
The solution? Let's rethink push. "Pull-
able" sources may be a better way to go. And several such options are starting to show up on the Net.
Search engines, such as Excite and Infoseek, provide customized pull-type pages. You (or your end users) fill out an electronic form detailing what you want to see. The service takes over to grab information as it comes off news wires. It prepares your custom page on its server and waits for you to receive it. Then you can get other headlines, stories, and links to drill down if you want more information.
News organizations take a different approach. CNN, for example, often adds options to headline stories in case you want to see previously reported events, related sites, a preconfigured search box, or a user message board. You pick your route for extra details. C-Net's News.com service contains similar information and frequently provides links to the companies mentioned in the article. TechWeb (a sister Web site to InformationWeek Online) lets you pull additional stories by searching for the topic th
rough all CMP magazines or TechWire.
Ideally, a third party will someday combine the stories from several news organizations and let you choose the ones you want to read.
No Free Lunch
To get the best information either pushed or pulled, there's a price. Gathering and arranging custom information is onerous, and no one is going to volunteer to do it for free.
Either you pay or someone else does. Since the "content for free" Internet crowd dislikes paying fees, information providers must find sponsors. It's just like broadcast television-you get to watch the news for free, but have to put up with annoying commercials.
Of course, Internet advocates say they can better focus commercial messages. Instead of the TV's broadcast model for commercial messages, push relies on a narrowcast model. It can segment the client market into thin demographic slices only dreamed of in traditional media. And with monitoring software, it can tell the advertiser which-or how many-viewers click-through
to see the ad. That eliminates the guessing game of whether viewers went to the refrigerator or watched the commercial.
The Web's structure provides an infinite number of possibilities for putting information into the hands and heads of people. So far, the Internet remains an undocumented library with plenty of good content, if we can find it.
Let's hope somebody discovers how to fine-tune the pull solution.
Cheryl Currid is president of Currid & Co., a technology consulting firm in Houston. She can be contacted at
cheryl@currid.com
.
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ush technolog
y, thought of as the next cataclysmic Internet quake, is wrong-headed. While push seemed like a good idea in the beginning, it has turned into a time-wasting, bandwidth-gobbling monster.
