Comments on: RSS is Push

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 [...]

By: Joshua

Joshua — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:17:16 +0000

Perceiving RSS as push technology requires an assumption of connectivity. If I go to my handy RSS reader and I don’t have a connection to the content source, especially if I haven’t had a connection in a while, the resulting list of outdated articles will quickly shape my perception to that of pull rather than push.

By: Daniel LaLiberte

Daniel LaLiberte — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:45:44 +0000

If the client in a polling system doesn’t poll the server fast enough, and the server expires older messages, then this “pull” mode will possibly miss some messages. In contrast, a “push” system will deliver every message to the subscriber service (listening for message deliveries), unless there is an overflow that would again drop some messages. So both modes are similar in that way too.

But how fast is fast enough for polling? A push system with sufficient buffering seems superior in scalability, provided all the messages are wanted.

By: Dustman

Dustman — Tue, 02 May 2006 16:54:47 +0000

I’d agree that you shouldn’t need to know the specifics of how a client-server interaction takes place in order to label that interaction in a user-meaningful way. This, however, is silly. You assume that the user can’t remember what he requested, and that every trip to his inbox and/or aggregator is an excercise in exploration and discovery (“Hey, how’d this stuff get in here?!”).

In fact, I’d go so far as to say the opposite, that users sometimes view e-mail as pull. To see why, go ask a common user why some piece of information showed up in their aggregator or inbox. For RSS, the answer is universally “Because I asked for it.”, and that pretty much defines “pull” to the user, regardless of the machine-level interaction. For e-mail, some things like mailing lists will elicit a similar answer “Because I signed up for it.”.

However, most e-mail would garner the response “Because someone sent it to me.”. To users, this defines “push”. There is nothing in the delivery mechanism that makes any difference to how they view their reception of the content in question.