It is happening again. A little more than seven years ago, the cover of Wired showed a giant blue hand shoving forward, as if into your face. Inspired by the success of PointCast, a clever application that displayed news headlines as a screensaver, our "Push!" story argued that Web browsers were about to become obsolete (Wired, 5.03). In the near future, we proclaimed, every kind of content would be popping up automatically on every imaginable device, from PCs and mobile phones to PDAs and wristwatches.
As coauthor of this infamous cover story, I was well-positioned to observe the debacle that followed. Browsers did not disappear. Instead, they became the world's standard interface for electronic information. PointCast, after spurning a buyout offer of more than $350 million from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., went on to spectacular failure. Users ignored it, system administrators banned it, and the market punished it. Before long, push was a byword for hype.
But recently, there has been a twist. I first noticed it when, after finishing a book about the history of Wired, I posted an entry on my blog, ruefully revisiting the push article. Though I dubbed it "the worst story Wired ever published," I quickly began to get feedback from readers who argued that the predictions in the piece were coming true after all. The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources.
There is a clear parallel between the excitement of the PointCast days and the enthusiasm for RSS today, one that goes further than easy harvesting of news headlines. Search engine results, product information, new music, notification of recent blog comments, and many other types of digital information are becoming available through RSS. This dialect of XML brings us the Web as an evolving environment: customizable, variable in intensity, and always on. This is the old promise of push. We can see the potential for radically new types of media - again.
But while the vision has become vivid once more, the seamless Web of the original push fantasy is almost as far away as ever. This is because the Web has grown far bigger, more diverse, more open, and messier. It cannot be unified by a single easy-to-learn, concretely useful specification like RSS.
As a dramatization of this case of "success within limits," you might read some of the hot posts flying between Dave Winer, one of the creators of RSS, and the developers advocating a new syndication specification called Atom. The evidence of their passionate antagonism can be tracked across hundreds of blogs. And the essence of their disagreement says a great deal about RSS and push.
One of the virtues of RSS is its simplicity. (The abbreviation stands for "real simple syndication.") But with this simplicity comes a certain crudeness. To Atom's advocates, RSS is confining and arbitrary because all it's really good for is syndicating news feeds. The Atomites argue that if RSS were replaced by a more rigorous and more general specification, it could surmount some current difficulties and go a lot further. But Winer wants to keep it simple and easy to use, and he has argued against all attempts to elevate RSS to a "higher" level.
As long as Winer has anything to say about it, there is little chance that RSS will become anything but a better version of what it is today: a tool for syndicating news and navigating frequently updated blogs. And this might be a good thing, because a huge number of other interesting push tools are coming online. For instance, Yahoo! can send stock alerts at customized thresholds to your PDA; Intuit will find the average going eBay price for an item you intend to donate to charity; Google lets you check prices for products across the Web from your cell phone.
I recently had a short email conversation with Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs (of Blogger fame), and, most recently, Kinja, which is producing a new Web-based blog reader to compete with Bloglines and other popular tools. The idea is to bring updated news and weblog headlines onto the desktop, allowing users to go through them without browsing dozens of individual sites. This is push. But RSS is only one piece of it. Hourihan points out that RSS depends on a "polling" system in which aggregators automatically visit blogs and see what's new. "Can you imagine 1 million news readers all checking 300-plus sites every 15 minutes?" Hourihan asks. "Or even every hour? It's so horribly inefficient." She hopes to see some sort of peer-to-peer solution.
Meanwhile, there are countless examples of independent applications doing little pieces of the work we originally touted in our terribly incorrect - but also, it turns out, weirdly prescient - story on push. Each day there are new announcements; some are based on RSS, but many are not. There are families of acronyms to explain how these applications can, and sometimes even do, work together. But one of the things we have learned since push is that at the level of real applications, we will continue to live in a world of translations, patches, interruptions, incomplete instructions, neat tricks, false hopes, and a receding universality that's always almost just as far away.
Paradoxically, this is a sign that the progress is real.
Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com) is the author of Wired: A Romance.
START
Hype List
The Return of Push!
Bionic Ears
I, Product
My Big Fat Net Roaming Bill
Jet-Set Engine
National Emergency Room
"My Name Is John, and I'm a Textaholic"
How to Get Megabits at 10,000 Volts
jargon watch
5 Bugs That Foil Fake Bills
Speed Metal
Identify Yourself
Hacking the Middle Ages
The Not-So-Great Robot Race
Audio Visual
Keeping Tabs on Steve Wozniak
Wired l Tired l Expired
