
The Internet is about to change - Anon84
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/25/the-internet-is-about-to-change/
======
mrshoe
It's hard for me to believe that push technology is going to revolutionize the
internet. Why? Because it didn't happen last time (or the time before that).

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)>:

    
    
        The PointCast Network used push technology, which
        was a hot concept at the time, and received enormous
        press coverage when it launched in beta form on
        February 13, 1996.
    

Since the early days of the web, people have recognized that the pull model
has serious limitations. Unfortunately, pushing data to users has never been
compelling enough to spark anything that qualifies as a revolution. People
really want data to be pushed to them if that data is intended specifically
for them (e.g. email and IM), but not if it's general weather and news data.

I do love Cuban's honesty, though:

    
    
        Would NY Times online readers pay $1 a month to be
        guaranteed that they get their news first, before
        anyone else? I dont know.
    

Most people would claim to be able to predict the future in order to make
their point. He doesn't.

EDIT: I should add that his idea that "Huge databases can talk to huge
databases and exchange data more efficiently" is cool and makes much more
sense than pushing data to users. We're actually working on something along
those lines right now...

~~~
sfphotoarts
I worked for Pointcast :)

The data was specifically for the individual, you could customize the data you
were pushed using the client. It wasn't just a screensaver.

That wikipedia pages misses a lot of the fun back then. Dave Dorman was a
really bad choice of CEO, he didn't even have a computer and his first
priority seemed to be picking the type of Walnut to have his personal
carpenter make his desk from.

Ah, the good old days of spending $80m...

~~~
Perceval
As a Wikipedia admin, I'd love to have you update the article for Pointcast,
_especially_ if you have sources you can reference while filling in the gaps &
correcting information.

~~~
xiaoma
Since he actually worked there and experienced what they were doing, wouldn't
_he_ be a first-hand source?

~~~
Ras_
It's not enough for Wikipedia. References need to exist in some form of media,
so if necessary, readers are able to check them.

Wikipedia Policy: Verifiability
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability>

------
haseman
One of the great things about the internet is it's always about to change.

I think these services have interesting models....but I'll be damned if I'm
going to let a 'sales tax calculator' blow a sale because it goes down. A
rational business cannot rely on services they can't, at least in some small
way, control.

~~~
akd
In fact, complications in calculating sales tax cause many businesses to
outsource their entire payments to something like PayPal. If instead they had
a number of competing sales tax calculators and other services, one can
imagine a payment platform built on a loose network of services with the
ability to failover when one goes down.

~~~
mattezell
Exactly. It would seem that one of the biggest problems facing the Internet
and the growing dependence on Internet based services/applications is the fact
that you are often fully dependent on (and at the mercy of) a single fallible
system.

If our next generation of web services/applications relied on (is designed to
be) a "cloud" based system, capable of dynamically switching between the
multiple available services of a specific type, your users could rely on your
service, regardless of what a single given service's stability or status is -
one goes down, another one picks up. *trivial example: Think Twitter outages -
if there was instead a redundant vanilla twitter-like messaging system,
outages would not impact usability of its applications...

This said, I cannot help but wonder about the fiscal reality of such a
infrastructure. In 'narrowing the delivered content more specifically to match
the actual desired data' and 'its delivery mechanism' being hammered out, I
can't help but wonder about the 'pay off'? Where is the mechanism that allows
"content owners" to 'brand' and/or capitalize on "their" data.

But that is a different discussion altogether...

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fnid
This technology has been around for a long time. It's fundamental to PayPal
IPN, their payment notification system.

I also thought it was funny that he said websites constantly monitor the url
for POSTs. I imagine a web server in an infinite loop, "Did someone post? Did
someone post? Did someone post?"

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pyre
I don't see anyone commenting on the amount of bandwidth this will free up
though.

Instead of someone's RSS Client polling 30 websites every 15 minutes, you have
a single 'hub' that gets pushed data once (the hub doesn't even have to poll).
This is not to mention all of those blog sidebar feeds that display things
like flickr/delicious/twitter/etc.

On the other hand, this might screw up 'reader statistics' depending on how
it's implemented.

~~~
progrium
I think Joshua Schachter told me something like 40% of hits on delicious
return Not Modified. Because of polling.

------
blhack
I'm sorry, maybe my ignorance is showing here, but in the example, aren't they
pretty much just describing a cgi?

for example...

example.com/cgi-
bin/gettaxes.cgi?state=AZ&longzip=85251&ammount=82521&trans_id=23894

which returns some text?

Am I totally missing the point here?

~~~
natrius
I think his explanation is just wrong. My understanding is that the web app
says, "Hey, if you give us a URL, we'll POST (or GET, PUT, etc) these
parameters to it whenever a certain event happens." On your machine, you just
set up a script at the URL. Then whenever someone you follow on Twitter
tweets, for example, Twitter will POST
user=blhack&tweet=My%20spoon%20is%20too%20big to the URL you gave them. That
effectively gives you a push API instead of the conventional pull APIs.

<http://webhooks.pbworks.com/>

~~~
Tichy
Still, I don't see how "webhooks" help? Isn't it equivalent to having two
webservices, one having a method for registering URLs?

~~~
natrius
You _do_ have two web services. If you wanted to implement what I described
today, you'd have to periodically poll Twitter's API or RSS feed for data.
With web hooks, there's no more polling. Twitter calls your web service when
there's new data.

Actually, now that I explain it that way, it doesn't seem _that_
revolutionary. It just makes building neat hacks a tiny bit easier.

~~~
blhack
I think you just got buzzworded, ;-)...

It sounds like this magical "push" thing already exists. It is called "get"
and "post".

For example, my website is a stupid news aggregator
(<http://www.gibsonandlily.com>). If a story gets more than ~30 points (which
is really rare since there are only a few people that post there), it calls up
tinyurl and says:

"Hey...tinurl, if you wouldn't mind, could you please give me a tinyurl of
this link so that I can post it to twitter?"

Tinurl responds

"Hey, I'M TOO BUY POSTING TO TECHCRUNCH, GO AWAY!"

To which my server says

"But c'mon, tinurl...pleaaaseeee????"

Tinurl:

"Fine, here, no go AWAY! Also, aren't I frigging revolutionary?!"

Then it calls up twitter and says

"Hey, uhm...brah, like zomfg wutcha doin? Check out this uber link!"

and twtitter posts it.

This isn't some revolutionary "push" feature, this is just standard cgi
action.

It sounds like this is the same thing, just in reverse...which really isn't
that "revolutionary", more like "duh".

~~~
natrius
What you're describing is a pull, so yes, a push would be that in reverse.
Polling is inconvenient. Web hooks aren't "revolutionary", but they're still
cool.

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datums
Everyday the biggest databases on the internet talk to each other. Did someone
forget about DNS ? I enjoy the 2.0 apps and technologies being developed, some
are being called disrupted others revolutionary, If you weren't around 1.0 I
can see how that's possible. PubSub looks like it could help make
communication between apps/server less complicated, not a changer.

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omouse
Correction: the _Web_ is about to change.

The Internet, not so much. The protocols are still pretty much the same.

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redorb
by my knowledge he is atleast weeks if not months late, on the news ... but he
does give a "reason to care" - which adds value to the conversation...

\- The web.. seems to change, slowly when we think its changing fast and
really really fast when it seems boring.

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progrium
I think it's great this idea is gaining mindshare. However it seems like most
people miss the point... even after me telling them they are.

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geuis
I think I'm on the outside and ignorant of this, but I don't get it. Of course
I'm very used to working with subscribing to events in javascript and this
sounds similar conceptually. However, I don't grok what the advantages are
between urls.

