Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!
technicalfault.net
technicalfault.net
That's not to say the web isn't being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their "aol keyword"?
The reality of "the cloud" is we're squeezing things back into a few giant silos.
You know, "the cloud" worked great as a fully distributed set of systems using standard protocols like SMTP, FTP, DNS, etc. It's not impossible to standardize interfaces. Our industry just needs a reawakening of its anti-silo past.
Which is fine so long as you can move between silos freely. I think some services are just always going to have t pool resources everyone can't have their own.
That may just be the problem. When everyone has full control over how they present themselves, then everyone presents themselves differently. The problem with this approach is the inconsistency - a user has to learn their way around a different UX for each entity's presence.
With Facebook and Twitter, it's a familiar UX for the end user, and the information related to different entities is presented in more or less the same format for all entities. This makes is easier for the end user to find the information they are looking for, and sometimes that's better than branding.
So, while it's important for an entity to have a branded web identity, I think that it's equally important for an entity to have and promote a presence on popular social media as well. It's a sort of dumbed-down identity for the masses.
I see this very same things on the web. Heaven forbid you use internet explorer as your browser or are a version behind. The amount of smarmy, "Use a real browser" messages I've gotten when testing things in IE is unacceptable. I have no love for IE, but lots of people use it, and I need to support it at work. Just because its difficult to write html for for certain use cases doesn't mean its useless. I understand when using something IE doesnt support yet, but that didn't seem to be the case with these websites. Often these sites are run by 20-somethings straight out of school with some kind of 'stick it to the man' identity politics. Yeah if you're a middle class person who went to college, have healthcare, have a non back-breaking computer job, etc guess what, you're the man.
I feel like we've never transcended the proprietary mindset and popularity still rules. This email client may be an extreme example, but the web is pretty unfriendly if you're not using firefox or a webkit based browser. Oh, the opposite was true in the past? So what. That doesn't make the current status quo acceptable. I love how we justify the various ways we refuse to learn from history.
On mobile its even worse. We're not even shoving things into silos. We're saying, "Look, this featureset which could be trivially be put into a HTML5 webpage is now a local app proprietary to this platform. Install it, deal with its constant updates, its crappy UI, etc." Does every newspaper in the world and forum really think I want to install their app? I'd have hundreds of apps on my phone if I did.
I really think we're regressing a bit. The cloud-ification and foolproofing of things just leads to a handful of megacorps providing near-mandatory services and applying their own policies and politics onto those services. We keep losing ground to them on things like privacy, stability, ownership, etc for convenience. Not sure where this is going to lead to in the end, but it won't be anything like we're used to. I doubt it'll be for the better. MSN and AOL tried to build a walled web garden in the 90s and were laughed at by the tech-savvy. Now the tech-savvy are the ones sporting ipads and android phones and willingly entering these new walled gardens.
- The code is all stored server-side; you stop paying, or the vendor loses interest, you lose the app. Poof. I can still run applications from the 1990s for research, but I can't run a webapp that disappeared last year.
- The protocols ("REST" not withstanding) are all proprietary. Given any two competing webapps, they almost certainly vend two entirely different protocols.
- Everyone gets the latest version whether they want it or not -- and whether it's a benefit to them, or not. If the company wants to insert ads, or revoke a useful tool that no longer fits their strategy, or take any other action that diminishes the value of user's investment in the app -- they can.
- Lock-in is standard; data is heavily welded to the particular application, and even where data export exists (a rarity), the formats are proprietary and ill-supported elsewhere.
For all the talk of "openness" for developers, the web has created what might be the most open-hostile environment for users we've seen since AOL and Compuserve.
No different than the native OS silos that those webdevs argue against all the time.
That this would be the case today would have been hard to believe only a few years ago. For quite long, the situation was the opposite.
The web looks fine in standard supporting browsers, and as of now that is Gecko and Webkit browsers (which by the way make up 99% of OSS browsers, like Midori and IceCat). Most of the other non-Gecko/Webkit browsers are Trident based, closed source, and only support Windows.
Using the web is a bad example for showing that there is a "proprietary mindset", when in fact all the standards about the web are completely open.
It's perfectly okay to say 'we support modern standards, older versions of IE don't comply with modern standards so if you use IE, you need to upgrade to a recent version'.
It's not okay to say 'you can't use even recent versions of IE because we don't like the brand name'.
(I think it is the former rather than the latter that people are generally doing, but it's worth clarifying the distinction.)
I can't wait until the js fad dies.
I had a relative who ran a business that only served customers in Manhattan. Brooklyn? Jersey? Not interested.
Why? His competitive edge was understanding his customer base cold. He knew what companies were in what buildings, and all of the trivia about different neighborhoods and streets that let him win bids and save time.
If you have the option of talking only to Gmail and still being successful? Yes.
A really good way to encourage innovation in the mail client space might be to write a proxy server for JMAP (or something similar) to a legacy IMAP/SMTP setup, and hide all the legacy IMAP/SMTP issues inside the proxy so that building a client anyone can use could actually be fun.
It won't be quite so fast as running a server that can support JMAP natively (we also plan to build an open-source JMAP server on top of the Cyrus IMAPd that we use internally) - but it will bridge the gap :)
AOL is, unfortunately, far from dead. There are still plenty of AOL email addresses out there. This is a problem. I've run my own email server for a decade or so, with very few problems. AOL is one of the problems. Every now and then AOL bounces one of my emails with an error code that signifies that my IP has been associated with spam or something of the sort. I know this is bogus. No spam, newsletters, or any form of email marketing comes from that IP. In the past I used to go through the steps to get my IP off their list, and they would always do so immediately. I don't bother anymore. If you use AOL you may not get all your email. If you don't like that, get a real email address. (The bans tend to last only a day or so.)
Google claims to be operating SMTP and IMAP servers, and they almost are. But they make slight adjustments to the protocols that tend to enhance their control.[0] They mostly follow the RFPs that specify how an SMTP server is supposed to behave, but violate them when they feel like it, while still advertising themselves as an SMTP server. You just need to experiment to discover what their servers will actually do with your email.
On the other hand, I don’t quite see how a fixed IP could get detected as spammy by AOL without there being any spam sent from it.
That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is supporting a walled garden!" or "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is supporting a walled garden!"
No - it's like making something that improves something else, for a demographic that you've decided has some kind of benefit to you or your interests longer term.
Building a tool that enhances a walled garden is supporting a walled garden.
> That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is supporting a walled garden!" or "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is supporting a walled garden!"
Where an operating system only allows you to run programs that the makers of that OS approve, then it is a walled garden, and writing software for it certainly is supporting a walled garden.
> "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is supporting a walled garden!"
Bad analogy, since none of these things are monopolies of one company.
How is it not though? One of the defining features of each mobile platform is its rich third party app ecosystem.
iOS was the mobile platform for a good period of time because the apps only it had. Therefore, those third party developers did in fact support the walled garden, you could even go as far to say that without these developers, the walled garden never would have been what it is today.
It seems odd to criticise Mailbox for only supporting limited services because where is the line to be drawn? If it extends to include Yahoo, Live, Outlook, does that cause it to lose its Walled Garden Supporter's badge? What about mail.com, hushmail, topmail, safe-mail, etc, etc, etc.
There is no possible way every feature could be delivered on every platform at launch (I already said this in another comment here), so I guess my point was that it seems unreasonable to bash Mailbox as a Walled Garden Supporter just because it started in one place. Everyone has to start somewhere - otherwise if the launch criteria is perfect, ubiquitous software there would be quite literally no software available.
I can completely understand why Mailbox only supports GMail and iCloud...so actually, we need to be getting on Google and Apple's case rather than app developers. Not that I'm biased or anything...
Having had to deal with Google's somewhat non-compliant implementation of IMAP recently, I'm not going to say that they're big on having their products interoperate.
However, I would be hard-pressed to make a case that Google is less interested than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter in having their products inter-operate, either with their own or with other companies'.
Google's entire business model requires a far more open web than the other three properties, in order to function. They still don't favor a truly open web, but they're far less siloed than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, whose business models all require[0] siloes in order to function (though for completely different reasons, hence why Apple and Facebook aren't competitive the way Google/Apple or Google/Facebook are).
[0] Twitter is arguably the only exception here.
Anything less is building a walled garden!
Never underestimate how much worse an "easy" silo can actually be. The marketing doesn't always match reality. The garden walls may yet be removed.
It's nothing more than technology inflection points in action. It will continue to repeat and there is nothing that can stop that.
Seeking to stop the so-called AOL'izing is like asking nature to stop making wild fires. These things happen for a reason, it's not a fluke, it's not bad. It will cycle. Prepare for the next cycle shift, don't lament today, build tomorrow, it's that simple.
It's no different than being upset about Android becoming the latest operating system monopoly, replicating what Windows accomplished 20 years prior. Stop operating system monopolies! Well, it's perfectly natural and will continue to happen. If someone has been around tech for more than a few years and hasn't figured out how these cycles and networks function, they must really not be paying attention.
I'm not an IMAP dev so I'm open to hearing differently from someone who knows better, but it was my understanding a network-neutral IMAP solution wasn't tenable.
If they can lock down the content that you see based on what they're getting paid to show to you, that's effectively what AOL was doing in the 90's and early 00's.
They're creating that walled garden around content.
At the very bottom, the largest population of possible users, are people who's toleration of any sort of confusion of nonsense from their computer device things is at zero.
As a company, you have to decide how far down this pyramid you want to target your products. The lower down the pyramid, the more work you have to put into your product on the usability side, you may even decide to ignore higher tiers on the pyramid because you can only put so much effort into a product, and the upper bits of the pyramid represent an astonishingly small fraction of the market space.
AOL did one thing really well, they decided early on to target the absolute bottom tier of the pyramid that they could recognize. This is pre-Internet days where practically everything you ever wanted to do with a computer was user-hostile. They didn't give two shits about users who knew all of the Hayes command set by heart, because those users were 1% of the entire possible market and supporting them was as much effort as supporting the 99% they were trying to get money out of.
The Internet didn't even immediately kill AOL, as in their own controlled user interface. It really was easier to start "your AOL" wait a minute for the funny sounds to stop and type in "gardening" to get more than enough information about that subject. You could even guess at keywords, "cars" or "cooking" probably took you someplace as well.
The Internet started at the absolute top-most part of the pyramid and we've spent decades trying to get it to work where all the money is, the bottom bits. It hasn't helped that there were all sorts of unexplainable (to the common user) hanger ons and hatefulness that users have had to deal with along the way. But every time we improve the experience a little, high fives everywhere and the bottom lines jumps another million dollars.
Anybody remember the old ways to setup an email client? Remember all the little bits and pieces of information you needed, POP3 or IMAP mail server, SMTP server, authentication, encryption methods, different user/pass for sending and receiving, opening firewalls, setting spam filters, etc?
Then it got better. The last time I set up Thunderbird I supplied it with approximately two pieces of information, my email address and my password.
Do you remember how an AOL user set up their mail? They didn't.
Why is this important? Because that other stuff is hateful to the user. It's also pointless. It never should have gotten to the point where I needed all that stuff just to get my email. But that's what happens when you design software for the top of the pyramid. You can make it as obtuse, undocumented/poorly documented and hostile as you want, and there will still be a small population at the top of that pyramid who won't mind dealing with it.
I was pondering the other day the vast reduction in websites (and other internet services) that I typically visit and use in a day from 10-20 years ago. Pretty much I use, HN, Reddit, Facebook, gmail and youtube for fun and my corporate equivalents for work. I felt sad for a moment because the internet used to seem so much more chaotic and vibrant.
I'm pretty sure that 10-20 years ago I'd have spent time on USENET, telnetted into something, fought with my mail client, hit as many ftp servers as web sites, probably at least 1 gopher site and more. I'd have probably searched for any search term on multiple search engines to make sure I wasn't missing any results and more. 20 years ago I would have even supplemented my time on the Internet with time on local BBS's, each with different interfaces and services.
But today what's the point? I didn't like calling into all those BBSs, or going to all those sites. One site with all those services is much less user-friction to deal with. I didn't like mucking around in some command-line ftp client, why shouldn't I just have a link on a webpage someplace to download something? Why should I telnet into some message board to talk about the Amiga when some meta-message board service lets me just go to /r/amiga? What's the point of gopher when the web works so much better? Why USENET when I can find better, less spammy conversation on HN or reddit?
And guess what? It's even better than that! I can shop on-line, I don't have to drive anywhere, deal with parking, deal with people, deal with the heat. From my toilet, on my phone, I can buy just about anything I'd ever want to buy and have it delivered to my front door within 48 hours.
It's not just that the world today is more convenient, in some notional tradeoff of power vs. convenience, it really is actually better. We're not quite at AOL levels of simplicity. I still have to waste time explaining to my mom why she needs to type "https://www." when all she wants to do is type the name of her bank and have it go there.
More importantly, there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody from doing any of the old things. Want to run a gopher site? Set up a gopher server and do it! Want to run your own private message board behind an obscure domain name? do it! You can still target that top of the pyramid user if you want to, but understand that if you want to make money from it...well...good luck.
Nobody does that because it's not a good way to do things.
One of the problems that tech people have is they get mired down in the details, seeing each step as some kind of accomplishment, when each step is just a necessary part of the whole. Raising a crop from seed to harvest isn't easy, but the goal is to have clothes -- yet tech people will spend an impossibly enormous amount of time on tweaking the harvesting process when it's all just going to end up as wool underpants in the end.
And of course, downvotes because I'm supplying uncomfortable facts about population distributions that every marketer on the planet knows.
You'll have to excuse app authors for not turning a blind eye towards the modern APIs that vendors expose.
To have a great standard, you need to have a non-standard predecessor that sets the tone, approach and philosophy and has proven itself out in the wild without the crutch of a standards body mandating its use. In this way "closed" and "open" work hand in hand to form a healthy ecosystem.
Good standards can't materialize in vacuum. "Non-standard" APIs are the fertile soil they grow in. Most of HTML5 was proprietary extensions before they were standardized. In fact, most of HTML has been "vendor specific" before it was standardized (including the <img> tag).
What is the alternative anyway? To "stop re-AOLizing the web" means to stop progress and stick with a horrible email protocol that has seen little improvement since it was created 30 years ago.
EDIT: All right, people are angry because I'm not acknowledging the current version, IMAP4, which was coined in 1993. Sorry, sorry. That makes it a very modern standard. It completely changes everything I said.
The question that should be asked is if not using IMAP gives for this app any edge over not using it? It seems that the answer is no.
1990-2000, I was an enormous Apple fanatic. I went to user group meetings. I read everything I could get my hands on about their tech.
When I learned to program C/C++ on windows machines at school, I'd come home and re-implement what I had learned using Codewarrior on my Mac.
Then, Jobs's return marked an era of change for change's sake. Apple went from being "different because different is better" to being "different because different is different".
I'm all about progress and improvement but I despise unnecessary and unproductive change.
This isn't true and it seems you have never used the app, so you don't know if an IMAP implementation doesn't actually have an edge over it.
IIRC, Mailbox actually had the ability to read your emails - some of the features they provided meant their servers had to have access to your inbox. Now, for this to work on IMAP, that meant giving Mailbox your email and password, and for Mailbox to store that in more-or-less plaintext.
Now as an enduser using Gmail, would you prefer that Mailbox stored your password somewhere in us-east-1, or an easily revokable oauth token?
Mailbox only works with Gmail and iCloud Mail. Gmail supports OAuth2.0 [0] while iCloud does not [1,2]. On the other hand, Outlook supports OAuth2.0 [3] and is not supported by Mailbox.
Thus, even if the choice of the authors of Mailbox gave them some edge, it is surely not the one you described.
[0] https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18649352/is-there-an-iclo... [2] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/01/apps-ask-icloud-password-... [3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn440163
It would be nice if Google were publishing their protocol as a standard that could be adopted by others, and eventually adopted as a formal standard.
But they don't seem to show much interest in doing so. There are certainly plausible reasons for this that are not simply related to maintaining their market dominance -- it is cheaper and easier to be able to change your protocol whenever and as often as you need to for your business, rather than try to align to interoperability.
So. What options do 'we' have for trying to move things along the process you describe, where proprietary innovation leads to inter-operable standard, when some key 500 pound gorilla players show little interest in doing so (or in some cases arguably an interest in resisting this)?
There are some similarities between the situation with email and that of html and browsers, although some significant differences, but perhaps the relative recent success (relative!) in maintaining interoperable and documented standards in browsers would be useful to compare and contrast. Email does not seem to be heading in that direction at the moment.
One of my least favorite arguments on HN goes like this: foo is old. Full stop. Entirety of argument. As if by virtue of being "old" (definition varies) it should be obvious to everyone that it's not as suitable as whatever thing popped up overnight.
Now I feel justified comparing a 1986 network protocol to a 1986 pizza. Would you take a bite?
Everyone who uses IMAP knows its weaknesses. I'm not going to write a book here. It's very, very slow; it has bizarre choices - I still don't understand why I need to delete my message, and then delete the deleted message; it doesn't support now commonplace modern features like tags; its push extension is so naive and resource taxing, companies just implement their own, even when otherwise trying to use IMAP.
But just being slow is an argument enough. I use a few email clients, only one client uses IMAP, and my stomach curls into a ball every time I open it, because I know it'll be synching forever. Even if IMAP being old is a poor argument, me getting old while waiting for it synching, sure is.
-- The NSAAs far as the popularity of Gmail email addresses vs. the influx of AOL email addresses in the 90s; it's apples and oranges. The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture.
It's not inherently bad many people share an email domain. That's silly.
Firstly, that's just plain elitist. The notion that the internet would be somehow better if clueless people weren't able to use it is ridiculous. Arguably the fact that AOL (and others) lowered the intellectual barriers to entry by taking an exceptionally complicated system and making it easy to understand was just a forerunner to today's UX revolution - taking complex, and consequently expensive, products and services and making them trivially easy to use is the USP of many, many start-ups. We don't say that Dropbox users are clueless when they choose not to manually configure file replication across their computers.
Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, I can absolutely assure you that there were clueless people on every ISP. AOL was the biggest but the fact that someone had a non-AOL email account was not an indicator they were any smarter.
That's well after the great AOL flood happened. Which was mostly on Usenet and mailing lists.
If you weren't there of course it sounds just like a bunch of jerks being jerks, but really it was pretty horrible. Once AOL gave out Internet access to all of its users, the signal to noise ratio on Usenet and many mailing lists went to crap. Usenet never really recovered and became mostly a place for binary distributions of questionable legality, rather than discussions.
In the long run of course more people on the Internet made the web what it is today, and for a short while it heralded cheap, high performance home internet (which then stagnated at least in the US.)
Look, the whole AOL thing is old news and I pretty much never bring it up unprompted. But the author brought it up. And he misunderstood why the flood of AOL addresses on the Internet in the mid 90s was a bad thing. It wasn't just because aol.com was ubiquitous. It was that the aol.com email address usually signified an ignorance of Internet norms, technology, etc.
Pre-AOL, most people on the Internet were either there because they were at a college (student or faculty), or because they purposely sought out a provider which usually wasn't advertised or widely known.
Really AOL is to blame for giving their users access to this new place without telling them any of the etiquette of that place. It's like WalMart buying country club membership for all of its customers without letting them know they need to step up their normal attire.
Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.
In fact, the percentage of people you'd reach in a given Usenet forum far eclipsed what you'd reach on most any web forum when people first started switching. And most people on Twitter don't have many followers.
It's not about reaching more people, it's about where the people you want to associate with are.
Yes, people did abandon Usenet because of the signal to noise ratio, and people abandoned web forums for the same reason nd will eventually abandon Facebook and Twitter for the same reasons.
Specifically, they made conversations almost impossible to have by making top posting of replies the default, coercing the user into a behavior model that was contrary to the best practices that had been established by users of email to that point. The predictable result of this is that people stopped bottom posting and conversation threads were made practically impossible.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is why forums took over from mailing lists. I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why Gmail became so popular, because it fixed a problem that should never have existed: it made conversations comprehensible again.
So while I wouldn't blame newbies for breaking email, there is definitely a strong correlation, and it's because of the inadequate tools they were provided with in those early days.
I would say I haven't seen an argument to convince me bottom-replys are better, but I honestly have never really discussed this with someone who cared.
The massive pile of shit problem is new to Outlook and Gmail.
So, bottom-first people are essentially don't-quote-irrelevant-crap people? In which case it would make sense to place the quote you're responding to above your response.
Trusting the whole email-communication to one company with a direct link to the NSA can't be a good idea. To foster that development with seemingly unnecessary restricting focus onto gmail is fine to criticize.
It is not like they had to choose.
But as far as an individual app developer choosing only to support Gmail, or only support whatever. That's their choice. That's not supplanting an industry wide standard. The case of Mailbox is very different from say, Mozilla removing IMAP support from Thunderbird, or Apple removing IMAP support from Mail.app. Mailbox as designed from the beginning as a Gmail client. That's not a flaw in the design, it's the intended design.
If you want a more general purpose mail client, make one. Don't fault other developers who weren't intending on making that in the first place.
I can't make another mail client right now, I already have a lot of projects, and some others on my todo-list (like indeed a rss-reader). But you don't have to build something on your own to have the right to critize other things of the same kind. That is really just unnecessary rhetoric.
The point of the article still stands: That the intended design is just targeting gmail is exactly the point he critizes. It is not a flaw in a design, the flaw is the design. IFF it would have worked with imap as well, but even if not, it still would be support for a too strong player (in his eyes at least).
And note that it is an appel, an advice of what would be better for the internet as a whole. It is not a design critic in the sense of "there is a bug". The article is inherently ideological, and that is valid.
> one company with a direct link to the NSA
is a blatant misrepresentation.
If mafia (or whoever) wiretapped your fibers would you be fine with people describing you as "a person with a direct link to the mafia"?
However, I meant it more in a sense that the mails will be accessed by the NSA, be it on Googles servers, on the transport between Googles servers (they tried to fix that though, didn't they?) or before. As a link on the level of the mails.
Yes, the traffic is encrypted now, see e.g. http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/20/gmail-traffic-between-googl...