
Two eras of the internet: pull and push - joeyespo
http://cdixon.org/2014/12/21/two-eras-of-the-internet-pull-and-push/
======
rayiner
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
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
"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
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

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blowski
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.

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normloman
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
Email, which is the quintessential "push" of the internet, and is not
dominated by a single company, was also conveniently ignored.

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TYPE_FASTER
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
My first thought as well. I still remember the cover.

~~~
nkoren
Vividly, yes. "The Internet is all about Push now!"

That was 17 years ago. Makes one jaded.

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timruffles
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
> 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
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.

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peterwwillis
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!

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vorador
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.

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samatman
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
I remember just about every PC Magazine columnist suddenly started writing
about "push" around the same time.

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netcan
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."

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aragot
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
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

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

