Russia Joins the Push to Push

By Bill Fick

Tired of surfing to keep up with global news and the latest websites? A free Russian software utility released in May can help bring the Internet to you without lifting a finger. The "RussianNews Ticker" for Windows95 (available at http://www.cityline.ru/~code13/ticker) creates a small band at the top of your screen which broadcasts a steady stream of news bites in English and Russian, updated periodically and automatically over the Internet, whether you are using a occasional dial-up connection or have permanent LAN access in your office.

Each chunk of flowing text is hyperlinked to a relevant website or e-mail address, and the ticker will also periodically check your e-mail box to alert you to the arrival of new messages.

For now, at least, the news stream is mostly free of raw advertising and users can customize the feed from a selection of eight "channels" or categories, including Russian financial and stock information from Skate, concert and theater listings from the Moscow Observer, global and Russian Internet and technology news, sports, weather, Russian jokes and aphorisms, "private" messages, and more. You can also send a short message to be broadcast on the Ticker from a form on its website. The developers, from a company called "Netskate", also promise new editions of the application which will provide streaming audio, graphic capabilities and more intelligent keyword customizating of feed preferences.

While the appearance of this type of service in Russia is a notable event, there is nothing particularly new about "push" technology which automatically delivers information to the user's desktop, freeing him or her from the need to find and "pull" information from the net during on-line sessions. California-based PointCast (http://www.pointcast.com), the leader in custom information delivery on the Internet, released an improved version of its popular software this week.

More than 1.7 million Internet users worldwide have installed the free PointCast client software on their computer desktops, allowing them to "tune-in" customized information channels from big name media companies such as CNN, The New York Times, and the Weather Channel. PointCast also includes a ticker with up-to-the minute stock price information for user-selected companies.

Like RussianNews Ticker, PointCast retrieves information automatically in the background which it can display on-demand in a television-like window or as your computer's screen saver. The entire enterprise is driven and paid for by advertisers, who broadcast animated advertisements to a corner of the PointCast window. First-time users often find themselves enthralled by the ingenuity and beauty of the animations, but the constant motion of the ads soon grows tiresome and they are impossible to deactivate.

Numerous other "push" services have also emerged, including NETdelivery (http://www.netdelivery.com), BackWeb (http://www.backweb.com) and Marimba Castanet (http://www.marimba.com/products/castanet.html), which even purports to download and install software updates and upgrades automatically.

In the long run, however, I suspect that few of these products and services will survive since Netscape and Microsoft have each recently announced that they will incorporate "push" capabilities in new versions of their respective browsers, and each has started to form alliances with various media companies to provide content. Why install a separate, disruptive program like PointCast if your browser can already do the same work?

The underlying philosophy of "push" also raises a separate question: Do we really want and expect the Internet to become a more passive transmission medium with "channels" like Television?

Advertisers, media conglomerates, and Microsoft might hope so, but in my view the Internet will always be most valued for access to an infinite array of mico-sources on obscure topics which, lacking a mass market appeal, will always need to be sought and "pulled" separately by users. The Internet is fundamentally more like a massive library than a book-of-the-month-by-mail club.

I don't deny that I enjoy the convenience of some types of automatically "pushed" information such as weather reports, sports scores and results on my mutual fund. But no search robot in the foreseeable future is likely to be intelligent enough to send me precisely the articles in each day's New York Times that I want to read.

What's more, PointCast has a long way to go in its basic mechanics: on Thursday Moscow time it was still "pushing" Wednesday's Times, though the Thursday edition had already hit the net.

Computer support staff in large corporations also complain that "push" technologies are a monumental employee distraction and can cause inordinate network congestion as they proliferate around the office. Many corporate firewalls simply block the traffic, although PointCast promises a special office proxy server for installation outside firewalls that will receive a single copy of each update to be distributed more efficiently on an internal LAN.

A different class of software such as Web Buddy (http://www.dataviz.com) which can download entire websites according to user specifications for later reading off-line from the computer's hard disk is actually much more useful. It can archive the entire issue of the Times to my laptop before I wake up in the morning, after which I can read it wherever I am throughout the day without network delays. You can check out a comparative list of these off-line web agents at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~duckegg

In the end, a balanced mix of information retrieval technologies and software will ultimately shake out of the Internet marketplace. But personally, when push comes to shove, you can be sure I'll always prefer to pull.