The "Push" Thing

"Push media" has become the buzzword of the month, with Wired, Business Week, the New York Times, the Wall St. Journal, and numerous other publications featuring it in major stories and editorials.

The reviews have been mixed. Wired, March 1997, was euphoric, while James Gleik in the NY Times Magazine, March 23, 1997, was downright cynical.

Wired's Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf see push technology as the next big thing--saying that the Web browser is "about to croak." and that "only when waves of media begin to cascade behind our screens--huge swells of unbrowsable stuff--will we begin to truly surf."

Gleik thinks "Push" is the antithesis of the Internet. "Push," he pontificates, "is nothing more than a thinly disguised return to the ideas of information delivery that the Internet has made obsolete. The failure of Push is preordained." He rebuts Wired by saying that the Web browser is not about to croak, but rather is "the ultimate remote control."

There is a little too much hysteria on both sides here. I think Push media is a logical extension of having the daily newspaper delivered to your doorstep. You're not passively receiving information the way you would from radio or TV, but you're not clicking and waiting and waiting and waiting the way we have resigned ourselves to do when we use a browser to pull down all the things we think we might be interested in.

Push makes information convenient--it even does some filtering for us--but it doesn't make us passive. Nor, for that matter, does it have to put a tidal wave of information under our mouse to be useful. I'll take just enough information to make me feel like I see "the big picture," thank you, and, oh, I want know how my stocks are doing.

I appreciate the way products like Pointcast and Backweb push headlines of stories from a wide range of publications onto my destop. I like the way the headlines link directly to the full text of the story. And, I like the way the Pushers hover around my desktop and send text and images sliding and gliding onto my screen. And don't you think the way they display information is more attention grabbing, more "scannable" to coin a word, than the front page of a newspaper or even the web version of one?

I also like the way my Marimba tuner lets me get multimedia content from EntertainNet--art/entertainment in a new form, similar to a CD-ROM, but with the timeliness of radio and TV and the creative freedom that is only available to those able to produce their art on a shoestring budget.

Columnist David Coursey argued in a session on Push media at last month's Spring Internet World that existing Push products are not true "Push" because they don't send updates continuously, but only at intervals of an hour or longer. What's the fuss? I don't see that much difference. Most of the information I get from Push services can wait a few hours. What else am I going to do, have a radio or TV set on while I work? That would give me near real-time access to major news events, but wouldn't increase my access to the really specialized information I get from my "Pusher." (I guess I'm already a Push junkie.)

Coursey says the true test of a Push product is how long it would take to make the news of the assassination of the President of the U.S. known to the world. Is this really what we're expecting of a Push client? If this news event took place, I'd expect to hear it from a neighbor down the hall who'd heard it on the radio or via a phone call from a colleague rather than from an Internet Push client. The New York Times won't have anything about it until the next day--that doesn't make me less interested in reading the paper.

Soon Push products will deliver news to us as it happens, and sometimes that will matter, but most of the time it won't. Let's appreciate what we're beginning to get from Push and learn how to use it better. It really is a significant breakthrough. It gives us real information, not just decoration, and it gives it to us in a way that is both faster and more "scannable" than anything the Internet has given us so far.

The Internet evolution of the past three years has been a story of "getting closers"--closer to magazines, closer to radio, closer to TV. Push is giving us something unique to the Internet--filtered information delivered to the desktop in a timely way along with interactivity.

Bandwith will get fatter, the media will get richer, it will all be full-motion video and 3-D environments in a few years. But we can already experience the defining characteristics of media in the 21st century, they are the characteristics of Push.

Past installments of Multimedia Web