The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after GigaOM asked whether Ribbit could bring web and voice together, Anil Dash gives the broader convergence a name: Pushbutton, a proposed upgrade in which any site or application can push realtime messages to a web-scale audience using free, open technologies.
The framing lands amid visible platform friction: days earlier, Twitter added limits to its verify_credentials() API in production without notifying developers, breaking password verification for apps built on its interface, while Facebook was pushing photo and video publishing beyond Facebook.com itself. Dash's argument — realtime without depending on any single company — reads as a direct response to that dependency.
First-order effects
- Any site or application gains a proposed open path to deliver realtime updates at web scale, instead of routing every message through Twitter's or Facebook's proprietary APIs.
- Developers just burned by Twitter's unannounced verify_credentials() changes get a concrete counterproposal: build realtime features against shared, low-cost infrastructure rather than one company's interface.
Second-order effects
- Twitter and Facebook come under pressure to keep their APIs open and their changes announced, since credible open alternatives lower the cost of building around each platform rather than on it.
- Hosting and infrastructure vendors gain a new product layer to sell — reliable message fan-out to web-scale audiences becomes a service category alongside bandwidth and storage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, realtime delivery commodifies into protocol-level infrastructure the way email and HTTP already are, shifting durable power from whoever owns the firehose to whoever owns the audience.
- Platform risk management becomes a standing engineering discipline: sites architect for swappable distribution channels, and unannounced API changes by any single provider stop being an existential event for third-party apps.
The trend: The web's update model is moving from polled pages toward pushed messages, and the defining contest of that shift is whether the pipe is owned by open protocols or by platform APIs.