Push Communication Services: a Short History, a Concrete Experience and Some Critical Reflections

This article presents some reflections on the development of push services and technologies over the Internet, based on work done by the authors in the Swisscast research project from 1997 to 2000 (www.swisscast.net). About five years ago push services were seen as a major trend in Internet communication. Users so it seemed would simply have to subscribe to a series of these services; then, they would receive all new information "just in time" on their computer in a suitable format. However, the actual development has been quite disappointing: despite some initial success, almost all of these services and software tools have been discontinued (see section 1). While one could simply dismiss push as a short-lived fashion, our experience in developing a push service (see section 2) and theoretical reflections (see section 3) show that services that organise contents and deliver them to subscribers may correspond to a real need of communication on the Internet and, thus, may have a real market opportunity.