'Push' technology gets a nudge
It's a new year, the tech economy is growing again, and we're just about due for a new digital fad -- or the resurrection of an old one. Think back to a simpler, stupider time -- 1997, to be exact. The Internet craze still hadn't peaked. Each new issue of Wired magazine featured several zany new business ideas, and nutty investors proved willing to give them a go.
One of the favorites was called "push" technology. The idea was that millions of people would grow weary of typing their way to favorite Internet sites. Instead, they'd install software on their machines that would automatically download data from popular websites, then flash it on their monitors.
"Kiss your browser goodbye," proclaimed Wired in a gaudy cover story. We'd get all our Internet information from push software instead. Advertising would pay the freight, generating meaty profits for the push software companies -- $6 billion a year by 2000, said Boston's own Yankee Group.
A lovely idea -- except that people hated it. There was an initial surge of curiosity. Millions of us downloaded the notorious Pointcast screensaver, the one that turned the idle computer monitor into a kaleidoscope of news headlines, stock tickers, and commercials for bad movies. But boredom set in, followed by outrage as corporate network performance stagnated under the weight of massive Pointcast downloads. Some companies saw their data networks collapse under the strain; others responded by banning the software. By 1999, Pointcast was dead, and so, it seemed, was the push concept.
But a few developers remained loyal to the idea. Instead of a bloated push client on every machine, these developers imagined simple, lightweight programs that wouldn't interfere with other computing functions. And instead of only serving up data provided by Big Media, they wanted a method that let anybody push information across the World Wide Web, at little or no cost.
This time, the idea doesn't carry a simple, catchy name like push. Instead, we get an acronym -- RSS, or really simple syndication. With RSS, any Internet user can automatically receive the latest updates from thousands of websites.
Say you frequently check the latest headlines from CNN. Instead of punching in the address for the CNN site every half hour, you could simply put a bit of RSS software on your computer and have it do the work. At regular intervals, up pop the headlines, stripped of gaudy graphics and irksome ads. Each "feed" requires only a tiny bit of bandwidth -- not nearly enough to clog a corporate network or slow down a desktop PC.
Quietly, without any fuss, CNN, The New York Times, the BBC, and many other leading news organizations have set up RSS feeds that provide constant updates to subscribers. Syndic8.com lists over 20,000 RSS feeds, ranging from top newspapers to obscure weblogs run by Internet hobbyists or political activists.
Indeed, RSS is a far more democratic technology than the old push approach, because anybody can create an RSS feed by adding some special code to his or her website. This has made RSS a favorite tool of bloggers, the people who use their websites to publish a running commentary on their favorite topics. Many bloggers now use RSS feeds, so that regular readers get a heads-up when a new article is posted. For instance, Stanford law professor and Internet activist Lawrence Lessig has an RSS feed on his blog. So Lessig's latest fulminations are automatically relayed to anyone who cares to subscribe.
Blogging services like the one at livejournal.com offer users a built-in RSS feature, sparing them the trouble of learning the correct codes. There's also an RSS service at www.feedster.com that will add RSS code to existing blogs.
Still, most people would rather read RSS feeds than create them. For that, you need a reader program, sometimes called an aggregator. There are plenty of them about, many of them free. One of these, AmphetaDesk, works with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers, and can be downloaded at www.amphetadesk.com.
For the more adventurous Windows user, the people at www.feedreader.com have a free experimental reader that works fairly well. A more attractive, feature-rich program called FeedDemon sells for $29.95. A 30-day trial download can be had at www.bradsoft.com. The $29 NewsGator program, available for a 15-day trial at www.newsgator.com, is perhaps the most convenient. NewsGator runs inside Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook e-mail program, so Outlook users can check their RSS feeds without launching a separate piece of software. All three of these readers are for Windows computers only.
Because RSS-compatible products are based on open Internet standards, anybody can produce them. So there'll be no RSS media empire or RSS billionaires. That's just as well, as it eliminates the hype that exaggerated the merits of push technology, and helped to destroy it. Instead, we can see RSS for what it is -- simple, powerful, and helpful. It's an idea from the Internet's adolescence, reborn into a world that's grown up.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
