Algorythm reminded me of a time, not too long ago when push was "the once-future king of content delivery". What a great line :)
Wow, I can't even remember the name of the company, but it was so cool, everyone installed this screensaver with stock quotes ticker on your screen, the latest sports scores. This company was going places. I am amazed that I can't even remember the company name, that's how low they went. At least Netscape survived in some form even if it was sold....
I remember when Backweb (was that the name? Another future-king Push company I can't recall the name of...) came out and I was shown a beta copy by a CEO who was so excited by it. Everyone was talking about this like it would revolutionize the Internet. And I'm looking at the product and thinking, boy are the tech media overblowing this. People won't want data brought to them that way.
I think the power of the Internet is not that content providers can push data to the end consumer, but that the consumer can find just about anything they want with pull technology.
Mark Pilgrim's problem with bandwidth is related to the fact that content aggregators are pulling his data too frequently. I'm not quite sure why he titled his entry "Push", to tell you the truth...maybe I'm missing something...
But one solution that would help his problem was mentioned by Fishbowl. The content aggregators would check first to see if content had changed before whacking the page....
This is actually the ideal situation for push technology. I don't think end-users especially appreciate push. But from a content producer to a news aggregator, I think it works well. Even Blog-to-Blog. You have new content, you inform a tool that either publishes or aggregates content that you have new content. Then the user can visit the aggregator any time he/she wants and find everything. No reason for the aggregator to pull. So why is there pull here? Because the content publisher is providing an RSS feed, and any aggregator is welcome to come by and pick up a copy.
An alternative would be a subscription mechanism whereby all aggregators could subscribe to a feed, would provide an address to push the feed to, then each time there is new content, it would be pushed to the subscribers.
This would work great for an application, but alas I don't see this working well as part of a spec.
P.S. after going to the link provided to Mark Pilgrim I saw and therefore remembered the screensaver push company name that would be as big as Yahoo...Pointcast!
