AMP for email is a terrible idea

Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much trouble you put into having things work flawlessly for months or years on end. It was important to find lots of visible tasks to go along with the invisible ones. I guess you end up with things like 40 Google chat clients and “hey let’s screw with E-mail” when there isn’t enough promotion-worthy work left to do in those areas.

Re: Amp, this topic always leads to people foaming at the mouth on HN. I don't expect to see much actual discussion occur.

Take Chrome's ad blocking... there's no way this can be ethically done by Google, even if blocking annoying ads definitively improves user experience. If Chrome was not owned by Google, it wouldn't be at issue, but it is owned by Google, and there's no way for Google to approach this topic. Googlers who care about this should push Google to split off Chrome into an independent foundation.

AMP is a way to push content to centralized platforms. Even if others run AMP caches (which are pointless because Google Search uses Google's cache, etc.), it pulls the Internet towards centralized cloud providers of which Google is one of the top three. And again we cross a huge self-interest issue.

If Google wanted to retain enough goodwill to even start to walk this back, they need to move back to open protocols. RSS (or a newer JSON equivalent), XMPP (or a newer equivalent), etc. And deal with all the mess that comes with true decentralized open standards. It's not like Google can't afford the additional difficulties. If their AI is as great as they claim (it's not, G+ porn spam is rampant), it shouldn't be hard for them to provide good experiences on open federated systems.

Want to run apps in emails? Great. Does the user want it? Can I decide which apps I want running inside my emails, based on what's useful for me?

Will the user get to pick whether their AMP emails are dynamic or not? Google+ notifications have a long history in Gmail of overwriting the display of the actual email with a live page, which can try to obscure the email's original content, like in the case of a deleted message. You'd have to use an IMAP client to see the content of the message that was actually sent to you.

- user receives email with a link (text or image) that points to some AMP page

- user clicks on the link

Gmail: - renders the AMP page in-place, replacing email content

Non-gmail clients: - keep whatever "link click" behavior they currently have

This does not render interactive content in email automatically and requires a click, but that click is important because it

- signals the user's desire to interact with the content

- follows current email security expectations, e.g. does not load third party content (other than images) just by viewing the email