“Pushing” Trends
Why are only now developers starting to really bring “push”-like services to the desktop? I mean: originally internet related services (like email and web pages) required the user to “pull” the data from the internet. Now recently there has been a lot more development for creating some “push”-like content like widgets, gadgets, twitter, etc.
I am just amazed by this recent focus on “push”-like services while originally services like telephones and sms have always been push services. Has the technology really never been there for the internet or has there been a refusal to go push by developers?
Perhaps it is due to the increased access to broadband. More bandwidth available means it doesnt matter if you’ve got a client checking to see if there are any messages waiting for it every few minutes. If I had twiterific open and checking for tweets every minute on a 33kbits dialup connection it would use a big chunk of my bandwidth but on my nive 10Mbits broadband connection it barely makes a difference.
Ok, good point. So the real question is: now that we managed to get the internet infrastructure to this point that it can handle this demand, aren’t the current protocols (http, etc) a bit outdated? I mean, people are now using AJAX with Jason and Comet to create a virtual pushing protocol. Wouldn’t it be nice of internet pages could actually have real push protocols?