Comments on: RSS is Push

By: John

John — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:49:56 +0000

I’m sorry but eventual delivery is clearly not all that matters to users. Users are very conscious of what costs them time and I can guarantee you that they will notice a 30 minute lag between arrivals. Having the RSS reader poll the server for new messages drastically reduces its usefulness as a notification service of any kind.

RSS is not a PUSH technology. Period.

By: John Hanely

John Hanely — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:27:25 +0000

RSS servers do not need a list of subscribed users – they only wait for anyone to connect. From a techie perspective, that makes RSS a PULL technology.
From a non-techie perspective, RSS readers (the humans, not the software) won’t see any feeds until they go subscribe to them. This also sounds like PULL to me – you figure out what you want, and your computer shows it to you.
From the perspective of a publisher, it might get a little more fuzzy – you create content and publish it, and your subscribers see it. That feels a lot like PUSH, but really it is only PUSH from the publisher to the RSS server. The publisher cannot use RSS to send to anybody – they can only use it to put stuff out there. Much the same as publishing with traditional HTML. The major difference is just that RSS gives users more efficient ways of PULLing.

As for the benefits of one method over another… PULLing is best for on-demand content (web pages). PUSHing is best for sending a person info he doesn’t know he wants (telephone, fax, email, etc).

The question of push vs. polling is a whole different animal, and has more to do with technological constraints. Pushing data is more efficient when possible, because it only needs to happen when there is data ready to send. Polling uses more resources (by constantly checking when there is no new data), but is the only way for PULL services, and for when firewalls and network architectures prevent connections from being made directly to client machines (which is nearly always the case now).

By: Bob Winehard

Bob Winehard — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:33:37 +0000

One account, two different email programs. Configure the first email program to pull emails every 15mins. Configure the second one to “Push-IMAP”. Then you will notice the difference between “push” and “pull”.

Pull just means getting things LATE while the Push guys are getting it instantly.

By: Raul

Raul — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:14:18 +0000

RSS and Email are not push based on your definition. The reason… push is when the server calls the client to deliver the info.
Geek or no geek everybody has at some point been with someone on the phone asking the question… Did you get my email? -Not yet, how about now?, not yet…
Chances are that when there is real push involved the info gets delivered faster and that affects all users regardless of their tech knowledge.

By: Alberto

Alberto — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:55:21 +0000

Both Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail support PUSH the “geek” way. You can configure them to leave a connection to the server open so that when a message gets there, the server pushes them to the client instantly (Se IDLE in the IMAP protocol).

RSS is not push no matter how you put it.

By: » RSS: Push vs. Pull Media, Technology and the Society

» RSS: Push vs. Pull Media, Technology and the Society — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:34:51 +0000

[...] very confusing for me, why RSS was announced as a push technology. I had to read several articles (e.g.) about the topic until I came to a shocking [...]

By: Frank

Frank — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:32:30 +0000

It reminds me of my high school physics teacher claiming that there is no such thing as (mechanical, as opposed to gravitational, etc) “pull”–there is always something on the other side “pushing”. Of course this is insightful, and fun, but does not operate on the basic concept that a person has–”pull” means acting on something to bring it closer to one’s self.

The same is here in terms of conceptual thinking–if the user does not need to be cognizant of polling occurring on one’s behalf, then yes, RSS is effectively “push”…

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:18:03 +0000

Clearly one of the different between PUSH and PULL and how quick you get the information. Like Blackberrry, people expect to get information right away with PUSH. If I get a email, I want to know the moment it arrive at the server. Cleary, RSS is PULL since when the RSS feed has any updates, I won’t know right away until I pull the information from the server. If the client set it to ‘pull’ from the server only one a day, then I will have information that may be 1 day old!!!!!

Again, the big different between push and pull is how quick you get the information without factor in how ofter you poll the server. Of course if you poll the server every second, you may get the information just as fast but you are just wasting network bandwidth compare to push method.

By: Push vs. Pull in der Informationsverteilung – eine Definitionsfrage? « Schaeferblick Weblog

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:35:57 +0000

[...] ist der laufende Emailclient, SMS im Handy und eben auch abonnierte RSS-Feeds (vgl. Beitrag “RSS is push”). Das gleiche Verständnis steckt auch hinter dem als Innovation gefeierten „Email-Push“ beim [...]

By: Klaus Eck lernt Social Media | digitalpublic.de

Klaus Eck lernt Social Media | digitalpublic.de — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:15:21 +0000

[...] Push und Pull sind hier offenbar nicht so ganz verstanden worden. RSS ist eine PUSH-Technologie. Nur Techhies bezeichnen es als Pull, weil der Client die Meldungen rauszieht. Aus Sicht des [...]