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Network Payload: 20 Items or Less, Please

I'm sure that we have all, at one time or another, experienced a true test of patience and restraint as we maneuvered through a labyrinth of aisles and abandoned shopping carts or inched our way up the checkout line when the person in front decided to pay in loose change.

Now imagine that everyone decides to go to the grocery store at the same time, creating a bottleneck at the front door the likes of a rock concert.

Payload on a corporate proxy or intranet server may be considerable if a large number of push clients are set to receive information at the same time. Under normal usage, servers see intermittent bandwidth traffic; people trickling in and out of the store at different times during the day. Push technology means everyone ends up at the checkout counter at the same time, all jockeying for position.

And since push requires very little effort on the users' part, they may be tempted to subscribe to a lot of non-work-related channels, thus placing an additional burden on company resources. Without sufficient bandwidth and server resources, users will experience significant performance degradation.

Overly Intrusive: Would You Like to Try a Cracker?

There's nothing more annoying, when you're in a hurry or trying to concentrate on something, than having taste-testers popping out of the woodwork to ask if you would like to try the new Cheez Whiz.

Many push software vendors claim that e-mail alerts are insufficient in getting news to users because they can easily get lost in a pile of other messages. They add that their product allows companies to force employees to take notice of corporate information being delivered in a more "in-your-face" manner.

I've never been a big fan of the terms "force" and "in-your-face." Unless the building is on fire, employees should never be forced to drop what they're doing to read something on the spot. From my experience, users found these methods of push content delivery too intrusive. Rather than reading the information broadcast onto their screen, they ended up dismissing it or ignoring it altogether.

Let's take a closer look at the problems associated with the three traditional push delivery methods:

News tickers tend to play havoc with peripheral vision. The eye has a natural tendency to follow motion. So, when you're working on something, you may find your attention wandering to the little news ticker scrolling at the bottom of the screen instead focusing on what you should really be doing. Much like the CNN ticker at the bottom of the TV screen, you end up concentrating on it rather than the main story.

Users often treat pop-up alerts in the same manner as Internet pop-up ads — they simply close them. And seeing an alert is a far cry from reading an alert. What's worse is that pop-up alert windows usually take the focus of the user's cursor. So if you tend to type without looking at the screen, you may find that the last sentence you typed didn't appear because the pop-up alert window had stolen focus.

Pushing content onto a screen saver has always been a mystery to me. Screen savers are activated when there hasn't been any PC activity for a certain length of time. And if there hasn't been any PC activity, it probably means the user is busy doing something else. And if the user is busy doing something else, why would they be staring at a screen saver like a television?

Information Overload: Price Club Mentality

Having your groceries delivered to your house is a convenient way to get all your shopping done without lifting a finger except to open the door. But if you buy too much at one time, you won't be able to consume it all before something goes stale.

When forced to search for content manually, users are more selective because it takes a certain amount of time and effort to find what they're looking for. With the convenience and automation of pushed content, they're tempted to adopt a kid-in-a-candy-store mentality by subscribing to more than any one person can absorb in a day.

After a user sees something of interest dancing across their screen, they may simply file this information away, promising themselves that they will get around to reading it when they have more time — and we all know that this time rarely, if ever, comes. By then, this large cache of information is out-of-date.

Conclusion: Please Come Again...

The list of defunct push products and services reads like a post-mortem report. Has push technology reached the end of its rope?

While push is certainly still used in corporate environments, it's unlikely that it will ever fill that niche it hoped to in the 90s by becoming the de facto method of Internet and intranet information gathering and delivery.

Although much of the fanfare has gone by the wayside, it's making a comeback in a smaller package.

With the increase in Web-enabled portable devices such as PDAs and cell phones, push has been given new life. Web navigation on portable, handheld devices is awkward at best. Having specific, user-defined content pushed to these devices will take the frustration out of having to navigate through a series of menus.

So, going to the grocery store isn't all bad. But sometimes it's so nice just to be able to pick up the phone.