[LINK] WebSockets

[Roger Clarke]

At 9:43 +1100 29/3/11, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>It might not suit you, Kim - but it suits my business to a T. 
>Individuals in organisations wanting to collaborate via web 
>interfaces benefit greatly from having pages updated in real time.
>It's not a gimmick, and saves considerable time and angst in not 
>having to refresh the page constantly ...

No debate there, despite my negative comment earlier.

The problem is that the feature has been designed for marketers, and 
against consumers.

What we need is a design that supports application designers who are 
working to balance the needs of multiple parties.

The idea of an open session with a remote server, with pushing of 
refreshes by that server, is very attractive for things like 
real-time document creation and online auctions (not to mention 
games).

The key to it is consent by the user, provided that it is free, 
informed and granular.  The 'granular' applies in particular to the 
capacity to give the okay to particular streams, from particular 
servers, rather than just opening up the device to all comers.

Okay, where the application is corporation-with-employee/contractor, 
the notion of consent needs to be handled differently.  But even then 
I'd argue that a remote user needs to have their hand on the 
throttle, to cater for lousy bandwidth and competing priorities for 
the available line-capacity.


Looking back at my 4yo review of Web 2.0, I may need to do a re-visit:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/Web2C.html#AltT


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University