What is the “pushbutton web”?

There’s been a fair bit of talk about webhooks and the ‘real-time web’ this year and a recent post from Anil Dash caught my attention as it gives an indication of where this is leading:

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real - Anil Dash.

What this means in a nutshell is that instead of you (or an application you are using) checking periodically to see whether something significant has happened in another application somewhere, you can tell that application to notify you *immediately* when the significant thing happens.

How this works, although important to developers and system designers, is not so important to business. What is important is what difference that kind of immediacy makes and what kinds of situations might exploit it.

By way of explanation, one example might be the ‘Yield Management’ methods used by airlines to try to maximize the profit they get from filling seats on an aircraft by adjusting the price as the day of the flight draws nearer. (Radio 4’s More or Less programme on 14 August 2009 contained a piece explaining this). I can imagine someone making a lot of money from providing real-time notifications when the price drops in order to sell the last handful of ‘normal’ tickets (i.e. not the ones reserved for the truly last-minute purchasers which are very high value). Although the real money probably won’t be in the ticket sales themselves, as they would likely get sold anyway, but in the distribution of the ‘agent’ application that receives the notification…

Think also of all those situations in which instant notification of an event to a large number of affected parties can make a crucial difference to adjusting and optimising a complex workflow - traffic incidents, turning around trains and aircraft, collaborating on time-critical projects; and also more mundane, every-day applications such as being notified when a loved one has arrived somewhere using whatever medium is suitable: twitter, sms or instant message, say.

Hmm, food for thought :-)

Please send in your suggestion for pushbutton web applications to IwonderwhatImightdowiththat@technophobia.com

This entry was posted on posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009. To receive our news updates directly, subscribe to our RSS feed


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