If Net surfers won't visit a Web site, there are ways of making the site visit them. Get ready for content 'pushing', says Tom LoosemoreSUCCESS on the Web is all about pulling power. The Web's rapid evolution into a rich, multimedia playpen is down to a Darwinian beauty parade-cum-arms race: the sexiest site gets the surfers. Thus, today's cutting-edge sites exhibit a veritable peacock's plume of animated graphics, RealAudio feeds and pointless Java applets; not forgetting the occasional word.
Ever-fickle surfers also need to be tempted to a site's front door, and that means spending serious money on self-promotion. Without ceaseless self-publicity, a site is simply ignored.
Worse still, even the most successful content sites, such as Time Warner's Pathfinder and HotWired, remain firmly in the red, despite attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors each week.
Amid all this uncertainty, the notion that the way we interact with online content could soon undergo a monumental volte-face is both soothing and alluring. In online media, the magic word on everyone's lips as we enter 1997 is "push".
Today, Internet users either venture on to the Web and grab (or "pull") anything that attracts their attention, or they sit back and let people send ("push") it to them via e-mail.
So far, the media industry has concentrated on creating rich "pulled" content for the Web. But there's no reason why rich content can't be pushed directly on to a user's desktop in the same way that plain-Jane ASCII e-mail has been for years.
Netscape's In-Box Direct adopts this model. Entire Web pages are dispatched as e-mail, to be read at the user's leisure using Netscape's Navigator 3.0 browser. Off-line browsing is another pseudo-pushy concept. Programs such as FreeLoader and WebWhacker allow surfers to download their favourite sites overnight, ready for perusal the following day.
And last spring, Pointcast pioneered the concept of the Internet broadcast, featuring hybrid software that crosses a screensaver with a newsfeed with a browser. It snoozes in the background, rousing itself every hour or so to suck in the latest news, sport, or share prices - you name it - broadcast from a central server. Nearly a million downloads down the road, Pointcast has signed up a choice list of content providers and advertisers.
Marimba is the latest pushy start-up to get the geeks going. Set up by members of the original Java development team, it is hyping its CastaNet technology as a step beyond the browser. Tune in to a CastaNet channel, and content is pushed on to your desktop not as read-only HTML, but as fully formed Java applets.
Surprise, surprise: Bill Gates has combined the best elements of the above technologies to come up with the Microsoft Active Desktop, which lets selected content providers pump frequently updated teasers into a brand new "channel selection" desktop window. Covering up to one third of the standard Windows 95 desktop, this is push at its most intrusive.
But hang on a second. Doesn't all this talk of broadcasting, channels and tuning smack of television? Wasn't the Internet supposed to liberate us from passive media being pushed under our noses? Isn't letting Microsoft decide what content I can view on my Active Desktop an unnerving proposition? Yes, yes and yes.
Actually, the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars are being thrown at push technology hints more at the failure of the online media industry to produce successful active content than at any genuine desire on the part of punters.
The Web took off because it gave total control back to the consumer. Pushed content reins in some of that control, which could prove mighty unpopular. Some of the technology has also been found wanting. Off-line Web browsing is a dead duck for sites produced on the fly; Netscape's In-Box Direct has not been a raging success; Pointcast is about as useful as a chocolate kettle to dial-up users; CastaNet relies too heavily on Java. The push towards push may simply be wishful thinking on the part of publishers panicked by their failure to develop successful Web sites.
As Daniel Rimer, Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist, puts it: "I think 1997 will be the year when you'll see more confusion in terms of this push-and-pull model." Too right, mate. And it won't just be surfers who are confused.