 
30/09/1997
Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce
TO PUSH OR NOT TO PUSH
By Contributing Editor Pecenik Miran
translation by Michele Clara
Pecenik Miran
is the chief of the Information and Communication Technology (and
also Webmaster) in the Nuova Banca di Credito di Trieste - Nova
trzaska kreditna banka.
In the last two years he has published many articles about the Web
on italian and canadian newspapers and his work was mentioned in
dozens of articles on financial and Internet magazines, on television
and on an italian national teletext. Overall he increased the popularity
of the bank with over 700 links all around the world.
He has spoken in various meetings, organised by the principal italian
banking corporates, such Abi, Ipacri and Istinform. In 1996 he worked
on a questionnaire of the use of Internet in Italy (nowadays the
biggest in Italy, with 1700 answers) and had organised the first
italian elections on the Web. In 1997 he tested the push technology
with a group of 700 people.
During the summer of last year I participated to the design of a
questionnaire on the use of the Web in Italy together with Giovanni
Montana, a student at the University of Palermo. To stimulate participation,
I launched Netzapping, a free-of-charge service whereby the latest
news on a range of selected topics were delivered by e-mail. Whoever
completed the questionnaire was granted the opportunity to select
ten topics/sites of interest within a pre-set range. Netzapping
was activated in November and lasted for nine months. 778 people
(from whom we didn't collect personal details) participated to this
experiment. They belonged to the most different categories of Internet
users ranging from university students to webmasters, from professionals
to senior personnel in the banking and computer industry.
In a nutshell, and under the constrain of the available tools, we
started to test the so-called Push technology (it is not me browsing
the Web, but the Net that comes to my computer, directly and promptly,
providing me with what is new and interesting). In order to have
some fresh material to work on, I started to monitor around one
hundred pages that I considered to be of general interest. Whenever
these pages were modified, I would compare them with the previous
versions: when I considered the changes to be significant, I would
e-mail the users on that specific mailing list. During eight months
of monitoring I sent around 225 e-mails, for a total of around 42,000
messages to 651 people. A massive work, but in principle a relatively
simple one.
The first problems emerged with regard to e-mail addresses. Around
15 of the e-mails announcing the start of the service bounced back
("user unknown", "the server could not be reached", etc.). Over
the following six months a number of users changed their username
(including firms and banks with nation-wide relevance). The causes
for this event have been twofold. On the one hand, promotional accounts
expired, and/or access rights were withdrawn (as in the case of
university students). On the other hand, corporate users realised
the importance of a domain of their own, and therefore ceased to
rely on that of their Internet access provider.
The analysis of the complaints I received can also be instructive.
My messages were standardised, without any attachment, and they
announced somewhat informally a significant piece of news (among
these I would quote the message sent to 257 people on January 17th
concerning the release of Office 97 few hours after Microsoft had
announced it officially). When the message was of a more commercial
nature, some users criticised this form of "advertisement", asking
for their name to be withdrawn from the mailing list. Some users
replied immediately to my first message, and asked me to be deleted,
for fear that the whole service would prove nothing but a new form
of advertisement.
This experience should lead us to ask if the current direction of
Push technology is the right one, and if the mass of users will
follow it. The availability of "channels" to grab a portion of the
needed site may be useful for tele-work, but it is probably insufficient
to satisfy the demands for learning and novelty that people are
currently expressing through the Net. If these tools will prove
themselves nothing but a channel for new forms of advertisement,
they will never reach the majority of users. One would seriously
risk to see banners like "Push technology? No, thanks!" or "This
site is protected from push technology" very much as it happens
frequently in our houses, where they are aimed to be the last defence
against the bulk of paper adverts that are distributed on a daily
basis through the mail.
From my experience as a Webmaster at the bank I learned that it
is far better to give users what they desire most strongly, namely
pieces of news they consider to be relevant and novel, rather than
what a potential supplier would like them to think to be relevant
and novel. The success of any Web site, as a means of marketing
and in terms of visitors, depends crucially on this decision.
It is certainly very good to use push-technology within the enterprise
to ensure that employees do not spend their time browsing "irrelevant"
sites, or as a channel to upgrade software applications; I would
exclude its use as an advertisement device. The need remain for
a human filter to select, with relevant knowledge, what news should
be passed on to users; a need that is even stronger when subscribers
are asked to pay for the service.
Concerning the tool to be used, I think that the most promising
one is the e-mail, at least at the moment and at least in Italy,
where "information superhighways" are still largely missing (waiting
for Internet II?). As these technical details are solved, it may
be possible to send entire hypertextual pages (consisting of html
archives, graphs and Java applets), but the need will nevertheless
remain for some kind of filters.
To conclude, this experience convinced me that it is not so much
the way information are transmitted that attracts the final user,
but rather the content of the information being sent. Reading the
specialised press, I have yet to find articles that give a sufficient
emphasis to this issue: everybody seems to be speaking about the
need to restructure the cache, or to integrate the browser and the
operating system, or about the way news-providers (and many others)
will be willing to pay to access these "channels". Personally I
believe that this is not the right approach; nowadays more than
ever, what is crucial is the content and the value-added that is
being provided to the users, with an eye to the entire audience
available (has anyone ever tried to design his or her pages for
the average user, and not just the professional one?).
As the SET standard for the security of financial transactions is
being finalised, with the development of Internet markets for small-scale
exchanges and the diffusion of Internet among users who are willing
and able to pay for the services they receive, the wrong approach
to this technology (which is by the way far from being a technology
yet) would be dangerous. Wise U-turn may be feasible for Bill Gates,
but not for many others.
Copyright Miran Pecenik, 20-Aug-1997
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