5 ms·

Two eras of the internet: pull and push

53 points by joeyespo 12y ago

vorador 12y ago
I'm not sure I'm seeing the value of push services. To me, the thing that was revolutionary with pull services is that, for the first time ever, you could tailor ads to your users. Push is just a throwback to the era of magazines: there's probably value in ads seen by millions, but only for some massive brands. All of this make me think that the push services are going to bring much smaller revenue than pull services, so calling them the next era of the internet is a bit optimistic.
aragot 12y ago
Facebook is full-prod live since 2008. I would have included game shops or buzzfeed-lolcats-type of business as "successful publishers" for it (No condescension intended, any successful business deserves respect). The fact that the author couldn't list successful publishers makes me wonder about the costs and hindrances of exploiting the Facebook/Tweeter platforms, and about the longevity of the ecosystem it generates.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  This. I like the control I have over pull. If I want to search for something I can. If I don't want to be bothered I don't. When I browse my Facebook feed I am still pulling - I want to pull news about my neighbours or their friends cats. I don't want ads - but we still get them, interrupt ads are interrupt ads even if they just need a swipe to scroll past. So, we have not actually arrived at push - maybe because it is not something beneficial to the user. Less control, less likelihood of getting useful information. Maybe when my neighbours push videos? Maybe when I can get truly local information, but mostly we are still at pull and that's fine by me
- cma 12y ago
  > any successful business deserves respect Concentration camp contractors?
blowski 12y ago
I'm not sure what is meant by the main marketing activity going from "links and algorithms" to "shares and people". In 2000s, a lot of time was spent on getting people to give you links back to your site - PR teams generating content, viral/guerrilla marketing that people posted on their blogs, etc. In 2010s, understanding the algorithms that decide when to show what content to whom is essential. If you just buy a load of advertising on social media and hope that people see it, like it and share it, you're going to burn through a lot of money very quickly. It sounds great to say "wow, we're going through another revolution!" but in reality, social media is just another channel that sits alongside search. For me, the biggest change is how we share stuff: * Private to public - we used to share stuff either offline, or through email, with a small select group of people. Now we typically share things on Facebook or Twitter, where it's either completely public, or with a large group of people that we barely know. * Unstructured to structured - we used to share 'stuff'. Maybe it was a picture of my son, maybe a set of funny picture of cats, or an urban legend about some guy dying in a bath. Maybe the recipients were my colleagues, my family, my friends from university - the platform had very little idea. Now the content that we share is analysed in detail. The platform can be precise about the nature of the content, who it's shared with (and who reads it and then re-shares it). * Distributed to centralised - rather than millions of independent Wordpress, PHPBB and email servers, we now predominantly use a few platforms - Facebook, Twitter (plus a few smaller ones like Reddit, Hacker News). For me, those are the biggest changes. And now that much of our lives are public, centralised and structured, it's fairly easy to sell targeted advertising in a way that would either have been impossible or ineffective 10 years ago.
TYPE_FASTER 12y ago
Third try is a charm: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/start.html?pg=2 http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/start.html?pg=2
- eli 12y ago
  My first thought as well. I still remember the cover.
  - nkoren 12y ago
    Vividly, yes. "The Internet is all about Push now!" That was 17 years ago. Makes one jaded.
- wiremine 12y ago
  I, too, remember the original issue. I thought it was mostly BS back then, but re-reading the first page made me reconsider it: "Sure, we'll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media - increasingly, the center of gravity of all media - is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Web browser goodbye." "But hang on. The good old page browser won't disappear. It will migrate. The little string of code that fetches and displays HTML documents will go forth and multiply, making what your browser does today second nature to all your other applications." This isn't a bad example of what has happened in iOS and Android: lots of apps pulling data from the web. And notifications are a form of push. That said, I still think the vast majority of the data I get today is pulled.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
netcan 12y ago
I like articles like this. Some sort of artificial lens you can look through and get some sort of insight. It may or may not be a thorough description of everything, but these simple lenses are sometimes surprisingly useful. An exercise here would be to find out if you're complimentary to one or the other. Wikipedia is extremely complimentary to pull/search for example. The New York Times is complimentary to push. Mechanics would usually be more comfortable advertising via pull, under 7s ballet is would usually be more comfortable advertising via push. Push advertising has a bad name because of bland TV brand recognition stuff, but it's actually good for a lot of things. The internet gives us a lot of "push" that is less stupid. You don't initiate, but you do need to play along. Novel concepts need push. Kickstarter is push. Oculus Rift needed push to get going. HN is push. Anyway, an interesting insight is that push's "content durability" is "flow."
normloman 12y ago
Complete bullshit. The guy bases his whole theory on just two cherry picked examples of successful companies. And by the way, Google and Wikipedia still pretty big in this era of the internet, so I don't see how we're abandoning "pull" patterns.
- dalke 12y ago
  Email, which is the quintessential "push" of the internet, and is not dominated by a single company, was also conveniently ignored.
- paul_f 12y ago
  Google pushes things to me all the time. Mail, weather, sports scores, traffic, etc. To suggest Google is a laggard in this domain is rubbish.
rayiner 12y ago
Three eras of the internet: usable, pull, and push. I remember with fondness the 1990's. Back then it was inconceivable to me that 15-20 years hence my quad-core 2 GHz MBP would get bogged down reading the news because of the rich-media pull/push/whatever advertising that not even blocking flash can give reprieve from.
- graeme 12y ago
  Know of any good explanation for why news sites are so bogged down? I frequently have to close them on my phone because it can't handle the articles. It seems like, other things equal, slow sites will do worse. So they must be getting some massive advantage to having so much cruft, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Of my day to day, it seems like only Hacker News, Paul Graham's site, and a few other holdouts load quickly and are easy to read. There's also less user generated content in google searches. All of that has moved to Facebook, Reddit, twitter. What remains in searches is more commercial content.
  - jerf 12y ago
    "Know of any good explanation for why news sites are so bogged down?" So you'll probably get cynical answers about lazy programmers and such, and there's some truth, but I'd suggest the dominant problem here is that the specification of the Web has very little consideration for possible performance built into it. Browsers are basically enormous constraint satisfaction engines, and that's intrinsically a fairly slow operation. Combine that with, well, a lot of the issues that HTTP2 is trying to address like requests for lots of small little resources, flash plugins written with their own programmer-easy-but-computer-expensive shortcuts, and the whole thing is very hard. Browsers are probably more "miraculously fast" for what they are being asked to do than surprisingly slow.
    - timboslice 12y ago
      That and a lot of news sites will pull in 30+ tracking beacons and external marketing tags if you don't have adblock/ghostery set up
  - 12y ago
samatman 12y ago
I remember this coming up in 97. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html This was the first issue of Wired that had me thinking "perhaps this rag has jumped the shark." Except we weren't jumping sharks back then. Note that the whole 'death of the browser' angle didn't.... quite work out that way...
- Agathos 12y ago
  I remember just about every PC Magazine columnist suddenly started writing about "push" around the same time.
- drblast 12y ago
  What's a browser? I think I remember something like that, but now I just use my Active Desktop Channels.
timruffles 12y ago
So Google will be shutting down search then? Or perhaps: maybe some tasks like finding things are by definition 'pull', and others are better suited to 'push'? The only information in this article: the author doesn't think things through.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > So Google will be shutting down search then? "Shutting down", probably not, but Google has been overtly, for many years, working to move more of what people use Search for into more "push" rather than "pull" based services. That's the core of, particularly, Google Now -- pushing information you would have been likely to have sought out proactively rather than waiting for you to actually search for it.
  - tomphoolery 12y ago
    That talk posted by one of the creators of Siri last week highlighted plenty of things that can still be done with search. Google's been doing a lot of those things, except with text. I don't believe they've fully given up on their search service. Search in the future will be more about compiling different structured information services together in order to show as much information about a given topic as possible. For example, if I search a movie on Google that is currently playing in theaters, I get a Wikipedia article, IMDb page and showtimes for the movie. DuckDuckGo does stuff like this too and I believe that is one of the more innovative parts of their engine, apart from of course the privacy features. While the voice recognition part of Siri is damn cool, the real killer feature of that app is the ability to pick out words and context from what you're saying (or typing, as the original version did allow just typing out what you wanted to say to Siri) and use that context to perform queries against an amalgamation of services to figure out what you want. There's no question that Google still wants to "own search", but their idea of "search", in my opinion, is more about what it will become than what it is today.
peterwwillis 12y ago
I've written many blog posts about the twenty Internet eras; so many it's unnecessary for me to explain them now. But trust me when I say they were well-researched and thought out, and in no way clickbait to get others to confirm my ill-advised beliefs shaped by casual observation and personal bias. (Just as a reminder: the twenty eras of the internet are push, pull, see-saw, elevator, jet fuel, anti-gravity, pancake, upside-down layer 7 cake, kaleidoscope, obtuse, vermillion, buckwheat, macho man randy savage, hooves, keebler, shilm, bob dole, sepultura, blumpkin, and pope) It's obvious from the pattern of eras over time (because, seriously, does that not make total sense to everyone??) that Google and Facebook are going to become obsolete quite soon. In fact, I think it's high time we had a paradigm shift in the way we process business execution in order to survive the constantly fluctuating post-apocalyptic hellscape we are all destined to occupy. What will the next era be? Why, probably one where the same old tired shit gets paraded around as something new by yet another johnny-come-genius CS major who thinks artificial intelligence is getting a response to their Twitter bot trained to respond positively to trending pablum. Who knows, someone on this very site could start the next internet era!
thirdknife 12y ago
Get the money out of client's pocket into your pocket.

53 points by joeyespo 12y ago

I'm not sure I'm seeing the value of push services. To me, the thing that was revolutionary with pull services is that, for the first time ever, you could tailor ads to your users. Push is just a throwback to the era of magazines: there's probably value in ads seen by millions, but only for some massive brands. All of this make me think that the push services are going to bring much smaller revenue than pull services, so calling them the next era of the internet is a bit optimistic.

aragot 12y ago

Facebook is full-prod live since 2008. I would have included game shops or buzzfeed-lolcats-type of business as "successful publishers" for it (No condescension intended, any successful business deserves respect). The fact that the author couldn't list successful publishers makes me wonder about the costs and hindrances of exploiting the Facebook/Tweeter platforms, and about the longevity of the ecosystem it generates.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
This. I like the control I have over pull. If I want to search for something I can. If I don't want to be bothered I don't. When I browse my Facebook feed I am still pulling - I want to pull news about my neighbours or their friends cats. I don't want ads - but we still get them, interrupt ads are interrupt ads even if they just need a swipe to scroll past. So, we have not actually arrived at push - maybe because it is not something beneficial to the user. Less control, less likelihood of getting useful information. Maybe when my neighbours push videos? Maybe when I can get truly local information, but mostly we are still at pull and that's fine by me
cma 12y ago
> any successful business deserves respect Concentration camp contractors?

blowski 12y ago

I'm not sure what is meant by the main marketing activity going from "links and algorithms" to "shares and people". In 2000s, a lot of time was spent on getting people to give you links back to your site - PR teams generating content, viral/guerrilla marketing that people posted on their blogs, etc. In 2010s, understanding the algorithms that decide when to show what content to whom is essential. If you just buy a load of advertising on social media and hope that people see it, like it and share it, you're going to burn through a lot of money very quickly. It sounds great to say "wow, we're going through another revolution!" but in reality, social media is just another channel that sits alongside search. For me, the biggest change is how we share stuff: * Private to public - we used to share stuff either offline, or through email, with a small select group of people. Now we typically share things on Facebook or Twitter, where it's either completely public, or with a large group of people that we barely know. * Unstructured to structured - we used to share 'stuff'. Maybe it was a picture of my son, maybe a set of funny picture of cats, or an urban legend about some guy dying in a bath. Maybe the recipients were my colleagues, my family, my friends from university - the platform had very little idea. Now the content that we share is analysed in detail. The platform can be precise about the nature of the content, who it's shared with (and who reads it and then re-shares it). * Distributed to centralised - rather than millions of independent Wordpress, PHPBB and email servers, we now predominantly use a few platforms - Facebook, Twitter (plus a few smaller ones like Reddit, Hacker News). For me, those are the biggest changes. And now that much of our lives are public, centralised and structured, it's fairly easy to sell targeted advertising in a way that would either have been impossible or ineffective 10 years ago.

TYPE_FASTER 12y ago

Third try is a charm: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/start.html?pg=2 http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/start.html?pg=2

eli 12y ago
My first thought as well. I still remember the cover.
- nkoren 12y ago
  Vividly, yes. "The Internet is all about Push now!" That was 17 years ago. Makes one jaded.
wiremine 12y ago
I, too, remember the original issue. I thought it was mostly BS back then, but re-reading the first page made me reconsider it: "Sure, we'll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media - increasingly, the center of gravity of all media - is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Web browser goodbye." "But hang on. The good old page browser won't disappear. It will migrate. The little string of code that fetches and displays HTML documents will go forth and multiply, making what your browser does today second nature to all your other applications." This isn't a bad example of what has happened in iOS and Android: lots of apps pulling data from the web. And notifications are a form of push. That said, I still think the vast majority of the data I get today is pulled.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

netcan 12y ago

I like articles like this. Some sort of artificial lens you can look through and get some sort of insight. It may or may not be a thorough description of everything, but these simple lenses are sometimes surprisingly useful. An exercise here would be to find out if you're complimentary to one or the other. Wikipedia is extremely complimentary to pull/search for example. The New York Times is complimentary to push. Mechanics would usually be more comfortable advertising via pull, under 7s ballet is would usually be more comfortable advertising via push. Push advertising has a bad name because of bland TV brand recognition stuff, but it's actually good for a lot of things. The internet gives us a lot of "push" that is less stupid. You don't initiate, but you do need to play along. Novel concepts need push. Kickstarter is push. Oculus Rift needed push to get going. HN is push. Anyway, an interesting insight is that push's "content durability" is "flow."

normloman 12y ago

Complete bullshit. The guy bases his whole theory on just two cherry picked examples of successful companies. And by the way, Google and Wikipedia still pretty big in this era of the internet, so I don't see how we're abandoning "pull" patterns.

dalke 12y ago
Email, which is the quintessential "push" of the internet, and is not dominated by a single company, was also conveniently ignored.
paul_f 12y ago
Google pushes things to me all the time. Mail, weather, sports scores, traffic, etc. To suggest Google is a laggard in this domain is rubbish.

rayiner 12y ago

Three eras of the internet: usable, pull, and push. I remember with fondness the 1990's. Back then it was inconceivable to me that 15-20 years hence my quad-core 2 GHz MBP would get bogged down reading the news because of the rich-media pull/push/whatever advertising that not even blocking flash can give reprieve from.

graeme 12y ago
Know of any good explanation for why news sites are so bogged down? I frequently have to close them on my phone because it can't handle the articles. It seems like, other things equal, slow sites will do worse. So they must be getting some massive advantage to having so much cruft, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Of my day to day, it seems like only Hacker News, Paul Graham's site, and a few other holdouts load quickly and are easy to read. There's also less user generated content in google searches. All of that has moved to Facebook, Reddit, twitter. What remains in searches is more commercial content.
- jerf 12y ago
  "Know of any good explanation for why news sites are so bogged down?" So you'll probably get cynical answers about lazy programmers and such, and there's some truth, but I'd suggest the dominant problem here is that the specification of the Web has very little consideration for possible performance built into it. Browsers are basically enormous constraint satisfaction engines, and that's intrinsically a fairly slow operation. Combine that with, well, a lot of the issues that HTTP2 is trying to address like requests for lots of small little resources, flash plugins written with their own programmer-easy-but-computer-expensive shortcuts, and the whole thing is very hard. Browsers are probably more "miraculously fast" for what they are being asked to do than surprisingly slow.
  - timboslice 12y ago
    That and a lot of news sites will pull in 30+ tracking beacons and external marketing tags if you don't have adblock/ghostery set up
- 12y ago

samatman 12y ago

I remember this coming up in 97. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html This was the first issue of Wired that had me thinking "perhaps this rag has jumped the shark." Except we weren't jumping sharks back then. Note that the whole 'death of the browser' angle didn't.... quite work out that way...

Agathos 12y ago
I remember just about every PC Magazine columnist suddenly started writing about "push" around the same time.
drblast 12y ago
What's a browser? I think I remember something like that, but now I just use my Active Desktop Channels.

timruffles 12y ago

So Google will be shutting down search then? Or perhaps: maybe some tasks like finding things are by definition 'pull', and others are better suited to 'push'? The only information in this article: the author doesn't think things through.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> So Google will be shutting down search then? "Shutting down", probably not, but Google has been overtly, for many years, working to move more of what people use Search for into more "push" rather than "pull" based services. That's the core of, particularly, Google Now -- pushing information you would have been likely to have sought out proactively rather than waiting for you to actually search for it.
- tomphoolery 12y ago
  That talk posted by one of the creators of Siri last week highlighted plenty of things that can still be done with search. Google's been doing a lot of those things, except with text. I don't believe they've fully given up on their search service. Search in the future will be more about compiling different structured information services together in order to show as much information about a given topic as possible. For example, if I search a movie on Google that is currently playing in theaters, I get a Wikipedia article, IMDb page and showtimes for the movie. DuckDuckGo does stuff like this too and I believe that is one of the more innovative parts of their engine, apart from of course the privacy features. While the voice recognition part of Siri is damn cool, the real killer feature of that app is the ability to pick out words and context from what you're saying (or typing, as the original version did allow just typing out what you wanted to say to Siri) and use that context to perform queries against an amalgamation of services to figure out what you want. There's no question that Google still wants to "own search", but their idea of "search", in my opinion, is more about what it will become than what it is today.

peterwwillis 12y ago

I've written many blog posts about the twenty Internet eras; so many it's unnecessary for me to explain them now. But trust me when I say they were well-researched and thought out, and in no way clickbait to get others to confirm my ill-advised beliefs shaped by casual observation and personal bias. (Just as a reminder: the twenty eras of the internet are push, pull, see-saw, elevator, jet fuel, anti-gravity, pancake, upside-down layer 7 cake, kaleidoscope, obtuse, vermillion, buckwheat, macho man randy savage, hooves, keebler, shilm, bob dole, sepultura, blumpkin, and pope) It's obvious from the pattern of eras over time (because, seriously, does that not make total sense to everyone??) that Google and Facebook are going to become obsolete quite soon. In fact, I think it's high time we had a paradigm shift in the way we process business execution in order to survive the constantly fluctuating post-apocalyptic hellscape we are all destined to occupy. What will the next era be? Why, probably one where the same old tired shit gets paraded around as something new by yet another johnny-come-genius CS major who thinks artificial intelligence is getting a response to their Twitter bot trained to respond positively to trending pablum. Who knows, someone on this very site could start the next internet era!

thirdknife 12y ago

Get the money out of client's pocket into your pocket.