There’s been a tremendous amount of chatter in various places over the last few days about the Microsoft embargo on its announcement today at Gnomedex. While splashing around amidst the leaks in the embargo, a few thoughts started bouncing around my head regarding RSS and that old saw, “push technology.” Now, I’m hardly the first to make that connection - and definitely not the last either.

When I saw the first outline of what Longhorn was proposing to do, Nick and I got to talking - and he immediately cited push tech as having had a similar goal in mind, back when the ’softies introduced IE4’s “channels.” These were designed to be content areas on the browser that would automatically update, so that when you got back online, there’d be a lot of excellent content there for you to look at, without you having to surf all over the place to find it. Nick actually had to help figure out Prodigy’s Microsoft channel strategy back in the day, so he’s quite familiar with the concept. So that suggested a blog post relating push to RSS.

Imagine, therefore, my amusement when I began to research the post and saw that before one could even get started on some of the comparisons and contrasts, there was an immediate hurdle: a year-plus old semantic debate over whether “push” and “RSS” could even be used in the same sentence. For instance, there’s Scot Hacker’s May ‘04 rant against the Wired Magazine article of the same month, arguing that Wired is wrong as much because it’s definitionally incorrect as conceptually off-base - since RSS is a “pull” technology, not a push. In contrast, there’s a CIO Magazine articlequoting Sun Microsystems “technology director” Tim Bray, who states “RSS is in fact push technology…” And so on - there are plenty of other examples on both sides, including folks from Microsoft’s own RSS Team in a video on Robert Scoble’s site.

At this point, we began to feel a bit like we did when we entered into a few debates around our most recent whitepaper on screen size. To whit: before we could even get to our point, we got attacked because instead of speaking in terms of “viewport” size, that is, the size of the actual browser window that people use to view the Web, we framed our thoughts in terms of monitor resolution. We won’t recap the whole thing here - but suffice to say that our most important, and most general, recommendations stood regardless of the terminology.

This is not to say that precise terminology is not important. It is. Rather, it is to point out that it’s often possible in the blogsphere to get buried under a snowball of scorn before you even get started following a train of thought. Call it the blog riptide. And it seems like there’s an excellent current off the shore of RSS with regard to the push/pull thing. Maybe not - we’ll see. But as we formulate our own conclusions about the announcement, I’ll also be watching just how the push analogy is used.

JF

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2005 at 2:22 pm and is filed under General, Diary of a Business Blog.