Two eras of the internet: pull and push
cdixon.org
cdixon.org
It seems like, other things equal, slow sites will do worse. So they must be getting some massive advantage to having so much cruft, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Of my day to day, it seems like only Hacker News, Paul Graham's site, and a few other holdouts load quickly and are easy to read.
There's also less user generated content in google searches. All of that has moved to Facebook, Reddit, twitter. What remains in searches is more commercial content.
So you'll probably get cynical answers about lazy programmers and such, and there's some truth, but I'd suggest the dominant problem here is that the specification of the Web has very little consideration for possible performance built into it. Browsers are basically enormous constraint satisfaction engines, and that's intrinsically a fairly slow operation. Combine that with, well, a lot of the issues that HTTP2 is trying to address like requests for lots of small little resources, flash plugins written with their own programmer-easy-but-computer-expensive shortcuts, and the whole thing is very hard. Browsers are probably more "miraculously fast" for what they are being asked to do than surprisingly slow.
In 2000s, a lot of time was spent on getting people to give you links back to your site - PR teams generating content, viral/guerrilla marketing that people posted on their blogs, etc.
In 2010s, understanding the algorithms that decide when to show what content to whom is essential. If you just buy a load of advertising on social media and hope that people see it, like it and share it, you're going to burn through a lot of money very quickly.
It sounds great to say "wow, we're going through another revolution!" but in reality, social media is just another channel that sits alongside search.
For me, the biggest change is how we share stuff:
* Private to public - we used to share stuff either offline, or through email, with a small select group of people. Now we typically share things on Facebook or Twitter, where it's either completely public, or with a large group of people that we barely know.
* Unstructured to structured - we used to share 'stuff'. Maybe it was a picture of my son, maybe a set of funny picture of cats, or an urban legend about some guy dying in a bath. Maybe the recipients were my colleagues, my family, my friends from university - the platform had very little idea. Now the content that we share is analysed in detail. The platform can be precise about the nature of the content, who it's shared with (and who reads it and then re-shares it).
* Distributed to centralised - rather than millions of independent Wordpress, PHPBB and email servers, we now predominantly use a few platforms - Facebook, Twitter (plus a few smaller ones like Reddit, Hacker News).
For me, those are the biggest changes. And now that much of our lives are public, centralised and structured, it's fairly easy to sell targeted advertising in a way that would either have been impossible or ineffective 10 years ago.
That was 17 years ago. Makes one jaded.
"Sure, we'll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media - increasingly, the center of gravity of all media - is moving to a post-HTML environment, a world way past a Web dominated by the page, beyond streamed audio and video, and fast into a land of push-pull, active objects, virtual space, and ambient broadcasting. You might not want to believe us, but a place where you can kiss your Web browser goodbye."
"But hang on. The good old page browser won't disappear. It will migrate. The little string of code that fetches and displays HTML documents will go forth and multiply, making what your browser does today second nature to all your other applications."
This isn't a bad example of what has happened in iOS and Android: lots of apps pulling data from the web. And notifications are a form of push.
That said, I still think the vast majority of the data I get today is pulled.
The only information in this article: the author doesn't think things through.
"Shutting down", probably not, but Google has been overtly, for many years, working to move more of what people use Search for into more "push" rather than "pull" based services. That's the core of, particularly, Google Now -- pushing information you would have been likely to have sought out proactively rather than waiting for you to actually search for it.
There's no question that Google still wants to "own search", but their idea of "search", in my opinion, is more about what it will become than what it is today.
(Just as a reminder: the twenty eras of the internet are push, pull, see-saw, elevator, jet fuel, anti-gravity, pancake, upside-down layer 7 cake, kaleidoscope, obtuse, vermillion, buckwheat, macho man randy savage, hooves, keebler, shilm, bob dole, sepultura, blumpkin, and pope)
It's obvious from the pattern of eras over time (because, seriously, does that not make total sense to everyone??) that Google and Facebook are going to become obsolete quite soon. In fact, I think it's high time we had a paradigm shift in the way we process business execution in order to survive the constantly fluctuating post-apocalyptic hellscape we are all destined to occupy.
What will the next era be? Why, probably one where the same old tired shit gets paraded around as something new by yet another johnny-come-genius CS major who thinks artificial intelligence is getting a response to their Twitter bot trained to respond positively to trending pablum. Who knows, someone on this very site could start the next internet era!
Push is just a throwback to the era of magazines: there's probably value in ads seen by millions, but only for some massive brands.
All of this make me think that the push services are going to bring much smaller revenue than pull services, so calling them the next era of the internet is a bit optimistic.
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push.html
This was the first issue of Wired that had me thinking "perhaps this rag has jumped the shark." Except we weren't jumping sharks back then.
Note that the whole 'death of the browser' angle didn't.... quite work out that way...
An exercise here would be to find out if you're complimentary to one or the other. Wikipedia is extremely complimentary to pull/search for example. The New York Times is complimentary to push. Mechanics would usually be more comfortable advertising via pull, under 7s ballet is would usually be more comfortable advertising via push.
Push advertising has a bad name because of bland TV brand recognition stuff, but it's actually good for a lot of things. The internet gives us a lot of "push" that is less stupid. You don't initiate, but you do need to play along.
Novel concepts need push. Kickstarter is push. Oculus Rift needed push to get going. HN is push.
Anyway, an interesting insight is that push's "content durability" is "flow."
The fact that the author couldn't list successful publishers makes me wonder about the costs and hindrances of exploiting the Facebook/Tweeter platforms, and about the longevity of the ecosystem it generates.
I like the control I have over pull. If I want to search for something I can. If I don't want to be bothered I don't. When I browse my Facebook feed I am still pulling - I want to pull news about my neighbours or their friends cats. I don't want ads - but we still get them, interrupt ads are interrupt ads even if they just need a swipe to scroll past.
So, we have not actually arrived at push - maybe because it is not something beneficial to the user. Less control, less likelihood of getting useful information.
Maybe when my neighbours push videos? Maybe when I can get truly local information, but mostly we are still at pull and that's fine by me
Concentration camp contractors?