It’s just another way for us to show you how much we love you. See the glorious pictures below.

Thanks for reading!

~ab

Push email was a revolutionary answer to e-mail’s failings. I’m going to editorialize the history a bit here, but as we understood what we wanted form this “electronic mail” concept, we drifted in the wrong direction (I’m talking about 1990-95). Internet connections were slow and while staring at the filing cabinet, someone somewhere decided that we should be able to save messages on our computers. Personal computers were finally powerful enough to handle this extreme piece of text editing (ah the excitement of word processing) and thus was invented pull (or polling) email. Perhaps we thought of it in the same way we considered our phone services (dial in to check your messages) or our paper mail (walk down to the mail box to check for new mail). Every X minutes, our email software would ask “hey network, do I have any messages?”

Polling was fine when you didn’t rely on email as a primary form of communication, but there were two major issues: First, as we became more reliant on this new type of messaging that teeny little delay, between the point when you sent your message and the moment when the recipient polled for new messages became too long… How could you have a serious conversation without reducing this lag? Yes there’s a smidgen of sarcasm here, but as email became more important, so did speed (although it may be a chicken and egg scenario). Second, mobile devices that polled servers were both slow and inefficient. It takes significant power to check a server for new messages and download all that data. This is completely wasted if there isn’t any new email.

Push technology combined with new mobile devices was the solution. Push is pretty simple: Instead of your device asking “do I have any messages?”, the server says “what up ab? you have a message”. Your device doesn’t have to ask anything and thus saves juice. Moreover, RIM (the Blackberry Company) packaged up the conversations in small bundles that traveled better than previous attempts. As a completely made up illustration, imagine that the server would say “1″ to the Blackberry rather than trying to be cool with outdated slang (sigh) and that would mean – you have a message.

And that’s it. That is the story. Sorry for not bundling it in a “what you need to know” vs “what you don’t need to know” format (as we normally do with Cocktail Party Geek articles). There’s way more to the story and it’s more complicated than the above, but hey – isn’t everything? As always, these are just the highlights… Enough to school someone over martinis.

Enjoy

~ab

PS: Vacay was great. Expect more frequent posts going forward.