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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#281

Post by pedroaraujo »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling. 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing. 2. Apple is a prime…

I would think that Google uses your Gmail to build your profile and to serve better ads to you. There is nothing more personal than your private email, so having access to your private things is a gold mine for their ad business.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#282

Post by mrtksn »

scrollaway wrote: post #272
mrtksn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Gmail a lot, my problem is with the lock-in due to the domain. I don't really want to move to some other service - what I want is the assurance that Google is not going to do something funny with my account or service and unfortunately if they do I will have no recourse. When I got my Gmail account in 2004 Google was this amazing website that will give away free services and their motto was "Don't Be Evil", at…

If you have no issue with Google's services other than wanting the assurance that you can get support and are treated like a paying customer, I recommend GSuite. Although I'll (hypocritically, since I don't use it) still recommend Fastmail anyway since I think GMail needs way more competition. I'll let actual fastmail users convince you there :)

I think at some point I will give Fastmail a try, thanks :)

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#284

Post by sam_goody »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #248
tarsinge wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try but there is no logic between your points 1 and 2 to come to the third. Apple sells hardware and is not a monopoly, so if their customers are happy with their choice then good for them. On the other hand Google is a monopoly, so a lot of people are not ok with them abusing their position to hijack the web (that they already “own”) and email. Edit: typo

Their search products are a monopoly, their email is not. I provide paid email services for my clients, they can use Gmail if they want, or not. But for SEO, it's Google all the way down...

Their email _is_ dominant enough to be considered a monopoly.

Simply because if they start pushing some format, everyone must go along with them. Your private server can afford to not be inter operable with Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, but not Google.

And you can rest assured that email you send, anywhere, will eventually be forwarded to someone on a Google server. If not directly, than via Google Apps.

But in literal terms as well: It happens all the time that I ask for someone's email, and they respond with the username and assume the "@gmail.com".

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#285

Post by mulmen »

As a user AMP has never once improved my experience. This topic comes up on HN from time to time but I still don’t see any value in the AMP model as a user. If it went away my experience would improve. Adding this misguided direction to gmail will only reduce utility from a user perspective.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#286

Post by adambyrtek »

cdubzzz wrote: post #264
madeofpalk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that's missing here is the email _client_ story. I really like Google's Inbox and there's no amount of money I can pay anyone else for a similar experience.

Honest question: do you think you really like it or are you really used to it? When Google made the move to Inbox, I switched because I wanted to be using their newest interface. Over time I came to absolutely hate it and that drove me away from Gmail. My wife still uses it so I occasionally find myself in the Inbox app on our tablet. Just a few days ago, actually, I read something in her inbox and for the life of me…

I really like how Inbox encourages getting to "inbox zero" (and maintaining it). It makes it very easy to archive things, snoozing emails for later is great, and reminders allow to add some short todos to the inbox where they are less likely to be missed.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#287

Post by Xylakant »

wklauss wrote: post #263
tarsinge wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice try but there is no logic between your points 1 and 2 to come to the third. Apple sells hardware and is not a monopoly, so if their customers are happy with their choice then good for them. On the other hand Google is a monopoly, so a lot of people are not ok with them abusing their position to hijack the web (that they already “own”) and email. Edit: typo

More important: 1. You knew the trade-off when you purchased an Apple device. 2. This is an unexpected change on a service your digital identity is tied to. That's why the equivalence the OP is making here is absurd.

It’s not like people have been warning about (2) years ago, pointing out that tying your digital identity to a free service provider puts you at the mercy of its decision making. If people at least used their own domain and forwarded mail to gmail, the fallout would be limited. But alas, people don’t.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#288

Post by matt4077 »

r3bl wrote: post #280
RobertRoberts wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their search products are a monopoly, their email is not. I provide paid email services for my clients, they can use Gmail if they want, or not. But for SEO, it's Google all the way down...

There's nothing stopping end users from using non-Google search engine. Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo... they're all viable products that you can use to accomplish 90ish% of what Google could find, and maybe even more now that Google strips historical data (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840 , from a month ago). Since you're mentioning SEO, I just checked and 15.8% of searches for my website came from non-Go…

Google's market is advertising. If you want to advertise in search, you do not have the freedom to avoid Google and just spend all your money with Bing.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#289

Post by phoneboy »

adamsvystun wrote: post #220
mankash666 wrote: post #207

I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling. 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing. 2. Apple is a prime…

> 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. I disagree. Gmail brought Google millions of customers. It's all about the ecosystem that they are building, which helps them retain customers. If you use Gmail, than there is higher chance that you will use Google Drive than competition. Another example of this is Google Keep. There is no reason for them to have free notes app, other than making y…

Exactly, this is platform economics 101. If you missed this then read: Parker, G. G., Van Alstyne, M. W., & Choudary, S. P. (2016). Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#290

Post by saurik »

dwaite wrote: post #214
davepeck wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t feel equivalent to me; I tend to think that there’s a meaningful distinction between a bug known before shipping and a bug discovered after. That said, it’s fair to ask why Apple hasn’t placed priority on the scrolling bug, post-AMP. What the real dynamics are I can only guess; I’d love to hear from lurking AMP or WebKit engineers.

The three main issues are that scrolling behavior was busted, clicking on the top bar doesn't scroll to the top like it does in all other scroll views in the system, and the URL bar doesn't show the 'real site' so links shared via the built-in mechanism are links to google, not to the actual site content. All three of these are Google not taking into account mobile browser design. None of these can really be classifi…

Google should have just not used a scrolling iframe. MobileSafari has this beautiful quirk that iframes greater than 8 pixels tall automatically expand to the size of their content, solving all of the awkward coordination problems of sizing the iframe. It would have been just so damned simple for Google to fix this in MobileSafari :/.
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