Sunday, February 11, 2007
Push Web
It seems that as the amount of content on the web grows, it becomes less and less efficient to surf around and look for interesting things. Where previously people would have their lists of sites that they would visit regularly to catch up on updates, more and more people are now setting up subscriptions and feeds so that they don't have to take the time to go and look if there is anything new.
Rather than going out hunting for new content, we want new content to come to us. We want it to be a push rather than a pull model. However, even with RSS feeds and the like, at the moment we are still polling our favourite sites at regular intervals, it's just that we have a machine to do it for us. Although we appear to be getting content pushed to us, we aren't really.
I think that the next step for the web is some sort of real push messaging for content, so in my browser I just set up a list of things that I'm interested in, and when new stuff is available, and I'm connected, it is piped to my machine for me to read. One of the things I read recently which reinforced this feeling was Tibco's sponsorship of the development of DWR. DWR is a framework for working with AJAX in web applications, and Tibco one of the big name vendors of messaging products.
Also, with the increase in the numbers of mobile devices used for internet access, push would seem to be a good fit. Connectivity for a mobile device is at best intermittent, and currently if I want to look at the news headlines when I'm out of signal range, I'm stuck. With a push model, my device can be updated asynchronously as I walk around in and out of signal areas, so I should have some reasonably fresh data whenever I look. It would be a substantial change to the way that the web has tradionally worked to push content to the browser, but I can feel it coming.
Rather than going out hunting for new content, we want new content to come to us. We want it to be a push rather than a pull model. However, even with RSS feeds and the like, at the moment we are still polling our favourite sites at regular intervals, it's just that we have a machine to do it for us. Although we appear to be getting content pushed to us, we aren't really.
I think that the next step for the web is some sort of real push messaging for content, so in my browser I just set up a list of things that I'm interested in, and when new stuff is available, and I'm connected, it is piped to my machine for me to read. One of the things I read recently which reinforced this feeling was Tibco's sponsorship of the development of DWR. DWR is a framework for working with AJAX in web applications, and Tibco one of the big name vendors of messaging products.
Also, with the increase in the numbers of mobile devices used for internet access, push would seem to be a good fit. Connectivity for a mobile device is at best intermittent, and currently if I want to look at the news headlines when I'm out of signal range, I'm stuck. With a push model, my device can be updated asynchronously as I walk around in and out of signal areas, so I should have some reasonably fresh data whenever I look. It would be a substantial change to the way that the web has tradionally worked to push content to the browser, but I can feel it coming.
