Sounds like Google's response to Facebook messenger & open graph.
Definitely agree with most of the commenter's. Sounds like a huge helper for google apps and the SaaS apps built on there.
Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
101–110 of 147 posts
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#102Hmm. Making a universal email message have bespoke instructions for a specific mail provider. Call me old fashioned but I don't like that. Infact I still like to read my e-mails in plain text. Also, I dare say, not so useful for the many of us accessing gmail via Mac devices' mail clients.
> Making a universal email message have bespoke instructions for a specific mail provider. Call me old fashioned but I don't like that. Its all using open standard formats, and the specific schemas are open standards or proposed for standardization (and Google has said that its schema support may change if the schemas change in the standardization process.) Other providers could use it as well. This is how progress h…
They may be open formats, but you can't just throw Microdata and JSON-LD into an email and expect Gmail to display your actions. You have to register with Google:
https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/registering-with...
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#103can we expect this data to start feeding into Google Now?
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#104Whatever happened to the Unix philosphy? 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well'. Last thing I want in my inbox. Call me a purist but email is for emailing people.
What happened to it? It's still around. People still write programs that do one thing and do it well. You're welcome to use them. Are you implying that there ever was a time when all programs did only one thing and did it well? Which era was that?
I think you are missing the subtle tones, implications and context within the comment. It was not meant as a blanket statement hence it is a comment against a specific item.
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I imagine that Google wants to roll this out to Apps users before general Gmail users. That'll be a first. Historically, Google has deeply neglected Apps users. My Apps account didn't get G+ until almost a year after it became generally available.
> Google has deeply neglected Apps users. That's a funny way of looking at it. I pay Google money for my account so that I have, above all, a reliable system to use for my business. No beta bullshit. And with Google Apps, that's what I get. Regular users are the guinea pigs and once a feature has proven itself year(s) later, it's added to Apps. As someone who runs a business, I'm quite happy with that approach. I get…
Yup - Google hardens consumer for the enterprise.
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#106How long till gmail us turned into a hybrid private messaging/gmail system tightly integrated with G+ (more so than now)? Gmail as we know it seems to be on its last legs. Too bad, because it is a good product.
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#107Whatever happened to the Unix philosphy? 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well'. Last thing I want in my inbox. Call me a purist but email is for emailing people.
Few things adhere to the Unix philosophies anymore, and really, why should they?
The question you should really be asking is why shouldn't they? The best applications out there do one thing and do it well. Awk, sed, vi(m), emacs, git. Need I go on?
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has there been any effort to create a standard subset of HTML that is safe for email? Seems like a problem worth solving once for everybody.
Not that I know of, and in fact real-live HTML emails often contain complete gibberish (made-up tags, etc.) that doesn't even validate; we have a bunch of fix-up rules for this stuff. CSS is a complicating factor as well: some CSS is unsafe and must be stripped, which requires a real (error-tolerant) CSS parser to go along with your real HTML parser. And identifying remote images: you'd think that was easy right? But…
Huh. I would think that the only ones benefiting from the current state of affairs are scammers and spammers, strange that the big players haven't gotten together and done something about it.
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't get it, wouldn't an html email with a form element do the same thing? No, it wouldn't identify the meaning of the requested action to the email client in a way which allows the mail client to categorize/present the email specially based on the requested action, and in a manner which is consistent with other emails with the same kind of action request.
So... you're saying it should have been conceived of as a particular file type and attached, like all other non-message-related elements? Would Google encode a vcf file in JSON and embed it in the message? How is handling VCF different than handling other optionally-actionable data?
> So... you're saying it should have been conceived of as a particular file type and attached, like all other non-message-related elements?
No, if I was saying that, you would have seen those words in my message rather than yours. If you want to say that, go ahead, but don't misattribute it to me.
But if you were to make that argument, I'd probably point out that its not "non-message-related" (actually, the biggest problem I have with it -- at least with the examples -- is that rather than adding semantic markup to the main content its all done by adding largely-redundant markup to the element of the main content; I'm not sure if this is required, though, and I would hope it isn't since schema.org microdata doesn't normally require this mechanism, and this style is an uncomfortable hybrid between separate attachments than embedded semantic context.)
And the file type is HTML. I don't see why an additional filetype is needed for this.
> Would Google encode a vcf file in JSON and embed it in the message?
I would be very much unsurprised if Google expanded its schemas-in-email support to include the schema.org Person type [1] and related types needed to support it, which provide the functionality provided by vCard (and a lot more). Since, after all, Google already supports that schema type for rich snippets in search.
[1] http://www.schema.org/Person
> How is handling VCF different than handling other optionally-actionable data?
vCard was a solution that was well adapted to the state of internet communications in 1995, but not necessarily the best model for new functionality in 2013.
Re: Gmail: Introducing Actions in the Inbox
#110Lots of strangely negative reactions here. We ( http://inky.com ) think this is a positive development and plan to support it as well. We're happy Google has promoted open standards in doing this.
It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?
> It's all Fire and Motion. Google wants this to gain traction so that competing email clients spend cycles gaining feature parity. And for what? Make clicking a link easier?
Actually, its to make machine-parsing of meaning easier so that information can be extracted from email and presented through other UIs (particularly, Google Search and Google Now.) Surfacing and facilitating responses to calls-to-action in the Gmail UI is important, but the big motivation is, I think, found in the two pages in the "Cross Google Experience" section of the documentation for the Schemas in Gmail feature [1][2].
[1] Answers in Google Search: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-search [2] Google Now: https://developers.google.com/gmail/schemas/google-now