the digital forest

When Push Comes to JapanWhen Push Comes to Japan

The term "push" was first coined when Pointcast launched its network service in 1995. Since then, many companies have jumped on the push bandwagon - and then just as quickly jumped off when Microsoft and Netscape entered the game. There is some debate as to whether there is really any pushing going on, or if it is just a fancy name for "client pull," but I think we can agree that from the user's perspective, content delivery has become relatively automated and is being delivered more directly to the desktop than ever before .
by Forest Linton

The state of "push" in Japan
Both Microsoft and Netscape have released 4.0 Japanese versions of their browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer features Active Channels, while Netscape has a component called Netcaster, both of which offer content on the desktop.

Internet Explorer currently leads the push race in Japan, with over 20 content offerings - including Nikkei Net, the Mainichi and Asahi newspapers, Recruit, Disney Japan, Impress, and AOL Japan - and a fairly advanced delivery mechanism. Netscape has released only a couple of Japanese channels to date - Asahi newspaper and Toshiba Jh - with more content promised in 1998.

In addition to these offerings, Pointcast and Backweb have also launched Japanese services. You can currently download their browsers for free (see below for the URLs).

First impressions
In October 1997, many of the push channels first became available to the public. It has been a learning experience for content providers, and for end users as well.

When the channels initially went public, several content providers were unprepared for the amount of traffic that they received. In some cases, their leased lines were stretched to capacity, and server performance slowed to a crawl under the heavy loads. Many of the available channels loaded slowly, and sometimes timed out. The content providers have worked quickly, however, to increase the performance of their channels.

The amount of traffic can vary greatly by simply changing the refresh schedule of the contents. A site that pushes new pages four times a day is going to be four times as busy as a site that pushes just once a day. Effective use of a cache can be a valuable performance enhancement; when pages are cached on the client side, performance increases dramatically. Caching also lends itself well to dial-up users, for viewing the pages offline when they are not connected.

The time of day for refreshing pages is a critical factor. Although it is much more efficient to push new pages in the middle of the night, a newspaper site with changing news will require at least a morning and late afternoon push schedule. Finding the ideal balance of which content to push, and which to leave on the site, can make a huge difference in terms of site usability.

Server-side planning
Content providers quickly discovered that a well thought out server solution is required to really push their content effectively. This is less a technical issue than an organizational problem. A content provider can't get by with simply authoring pages and sticking them up on a server. In the same way that a broadcaster must plan a programming schedule, a content provider must plan the structure and organization of its content.

Issues include the rotation of headline news and ad banners; deciding which content to push to users, and which to cache off line; creating an intuitive interface; and enabling easy access to search functions and archived data. To do this well, much of the site needs to be database driven, with pages created dynamically. Some browsers offer advanced features like offline logging, which can be posted back to the server for analysis, but to really make use of this data, the content provider needs to be using an ad management server that can analyze both offline logs and online access to create an overall access report for its advertisers. Software vendors are now beginning to release a variety of servers to meet such needs.

Is there usable content?
Content providers are still in a learning period, but there are some usable and handy channels out there right now. Performance issues remain, but several of the news and technology information providers offer readily accessible content available on the desktop that automatically refreshes, saving the user from having to go to the site each day. Dial-up users can also set the channel to update in the middle of the night when phone rates are lowest, and cache the content on their machine to be viewed offline the next morning.

Entertainment and lifestyle are the categories that seem to struggle the most with the whole push concept. Often lacking new daily content, these providers rely on an interesting presentation to catch the user. This can result in a heavy, hard-to-update channel - one that a user grows tired of after a few updates.

I plan to cover emerging push technologies in Japan in greater detail in a feature article later this year, as well as interview several of the content pioneers regarding their views on the future of content in Japan. The early verdict, however, is that while it is off to a shaky start, there is hope for push in Japan.

Forest Linton pushes information and opinions about the Internet to Computing Japan readers here every month in "The Digital Forest." Address your Net-related questions or comments to forest@gol.com.
Where to get push clients
Backweb http://www.backweb.com
Internet Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/ie
Netscape http://www.netscape.com
Pointcast http://www.pointcast.com



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