| Art Botterell |
Push Me Pull You
| Art Botterell wonders why there are only two industries that refer to their clients as "users." |
This article can be found on
page 62 of the Sept/Oct 1997
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
People don't like to be pushed around, as a rule. So how do we feel about "push technology" on the Internet?
The World Wide Web is what's called a "pull" mode of information transfer. Web pages sit on their servers and wait for us to pull them onto our screens. Just like in a library, we have to go get what we want.
Push technologies are more like this magazine. We subscribe and thereafter the editors select and format information and deliver it to our doorsteps. Radio and television are push technologies on the mass scale. The telephone, pagers and e-mail are push media, too; they're just cheaper and more individualized.
In reality, of course, the terms "push" and "pull" are relative. Once this magazine hits your mailbox the push phase is over. You still have to pick it up and start reading - that's a pull. In fact, there are very few pure push media. That's one of the basic problems in the design of emergency alerting systems but that's another topic.
So why do we need push on the Internet at all? It turns out that push is only incidental to what we're really after.
With so much information out there what we're really hoping for is something that will beat the bushes for information we care about, put it together with other information we care about, and present it all to us in a convenient way. In the computer world these gizmos are called "intelligent agents." In more traditional fields their human counterparts are called "editors," "consultants," "administrative assistants," and so on.
Push is only important because it gives our agents/editors on the Net a way to report back when they have something ready for us. Without push, we have to keep checking to see if there's anything new. It's as if we had to go door to door through our districts checking to see if anybody needs any help.
E-mail is still the simplest and most common form of Internet push. For example, every morning I read a personalized round-up of stories on computer, network and multimedia industry news stories assembled and mailed to me by an agent program at Individual, Inc. (www.individual.com). I also get weather reports for cities I visit frequently from the Weather Channel (www.weather.com) and headlines from the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) and several other major newspapers.
I can scan the headlines and summaries quickly for overview of the main trends. If an item seems important I can click to a Web page for the full story. The whole process usually takes me a cup of coffee to complete.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of these e-mail push services available, covering almost every topic you can imagine. Some of them are personalized based on information I provided about my interests. Others are designed for a group of subscribers who share a common interest. Some are assembled by hand, others are totally automated. In every case, though, behind the push technology there's an editorial process, if not a human editor.
The PointCast Network made history last year with a system that pushes a little harder. PointCast (www.pointcast.com) acts as a sort of smart screensaver. Instead of filling our unused screens with flying toasters and shotgun-toting penguins, PointCast gives us an animated display of news headlines, sports scores, stock quotes and the like. Again, we can "click through" to get more detail if we want it, or switch back to our workaday computer programs.
On the surface, turning every inactive computer into a multimedia billboard (yep, complete with ads!) seems like a huge change. Remember, though, that the display would be nothing but a random walk through cyberspace if it weren't for the "agent" function behind the screen.
Publisher and author Stewart Brand, in his book "The Media Lab," points out that information service subscribers don't pay for the quality of the information (which they can't judge until after the sale) but instead for the quality of the source. Subscribing to any "push" service be it an Internet service, a TV show or a magazine means forging a relationship with the agent at the other end. It will help to keep that in mind as we sort through the hype over Internet/television convergence and other sexy new connections.
By the way... we have some very sophisticated intelligent agents already at work in our communication centers. For historic reasons we call them "dispatchers." They make sense of what's happening out there and give us handcrafted summaries. And if they push us a little from time to time, that's just as it should be.
