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Gmail, We Need to Talk

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Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#241

Post by qewrffewqwfqew »

cronjobber wrote: post #207
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #77

I've become convinced that gmail's goal is not to improve email, but to extinguish and replace it. This article talks about one minor aspect of that. In addition: * breaking established addressing conventions. Gmail (last time I used it) made it difficult to distinguish between To: and Cc:, both in received emails and when sending. * messed-up quoting, and other broken conventions. * the one that's been discussed to…

Back in pre-history, they did a similar number on their usenet interface, again after having offered a decent product for long enough to lure people away from running local clients.

They killed usenet off good by providing a reasonable interface that encouraged people to link to it .. then destabilising the URLs. I've seen wiki links to google groups that have been changed 3 or 4 times before people simply gave up trying to re-find the original target.

Pisses me off no end.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#242

Post by quanticle »

batiudrami wrote: post #152
maxxxxx wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my theory too. It seems a lot of software has peaked a few years ago and gone downhill from there: - MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.

MS Office is much more usable now than it was in 2000. Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all. They're presented with either two rows of incomprehensible buttons, no logical order, and additional features hidden in the menu bar, compared to having features (reasonably) logically organised behind tabs and grouped into sections and frequently with labels. Sure, for power users, some things ta…

>Consider a new user, with no experience in office software at all.

But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I'm hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who've never used an office suite (and can't use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.

In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn't apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.

I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren't familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of forgetting the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you're starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#243

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #240
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HERE is pretty great. I've been amazed how basic things like a list of recent searches (something that can be easily stored locally on your device) aren't even available on Google Maps if you turn their cloud location stalking off. Whereas HERE provides a pretty functionally useful app without me even having an account with them.

Maps holds my recent searches. Even shows cross device searches. Perhaps that's cause I have Google Now and/or Chrome sync set-up?

It might be tied to some of the search history settings? It's tied to one of the cloud privacy settings. If you turn it off, it doesn't even provide recent searches on the device itself.

I want that feature, but that shouldn't entitle Google to have that data on their servers.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#244

Post by jinst8gmi »

CaptSpify wrote: post #239
jinst8gmi wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who gets all my email hand-carved into stone tablets in ancient Greek I also don't see the problem.

You say that like a terminal is a step back. I see it as the opposite: I started with email in web-based systems. Terminals improved my email experience 100-fold

I'm saying that your usage pattern has little in common with the 99.99% of gmail users, hence isn't super-relevant as a data point to be used in the design of gmail.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#245

Post by MrScruff »

dvdgsng wrote: post #198
MrScruff wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a real estate app that sends me emails about new properties, with tables of data and embedded images. I couldn't do this with plain text email.

Attach a PDF?

It has hyperlinks. The whole purpose of the app is to be information dense so I can review as much data as possible. Works great with google inbox.

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#246

Post by DaveWalk »

g_delgado14 wrote: post #102
csomar wrote: post #83

If you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail 1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address. 2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left…

> If you don't pay for the product, you are the product I'm starting to think that this statement is becoming really generalized. Anonymized data has the power to help society. I.e. anonymized cancer patient data to help doctors see larger societal trends without jeopardizing client privacy. I trust larry page and the Google team, and presume Google is handling my data responsibly.

You have a really interesting argument against the oft-repeated "If you don't pay, you are the product." I think you are right, that there is great power in anonymized data, but ultimately motives matter. From what I saw as a former scientist, the goodwill of patients donating their tissues formed the foundation of great cancer (and neuroscience, and HIV, and...) research. IBut I think there is a social contract for scientists (and open-source programmers, and nonprofits, and...) that gives them credibility. Maybe it's our human nature to trust them, and for them to trust themselves?

But 1)corporations are obliged to care about profit, and 2) anonymized data can be de-anonymized with (to me) astonishing ease. In Data and Goliath Bruce Schneier cites a dozen cases of de-anonymized data, from health records to Netflix history to personal identification.[0] It is possible that I'm just more paranoid than the average GMail user, but this scared the bones out of me.

[0] An example on his website: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/reidentifying...

Re: Gmail, We Need to Talk

#247

Post by DaveWalk »

bad_user wrote: post #111
csomar wrote: post #83

If you haven't already, you are better leaving Gmail 1. Have your own domain for emails. This is important. Gmail (or any service provider) can block you/remove your account for no reason and with no recourse. Your email is very important if you are doing serious work and have financial sites and data linked to that email address. 2. The very reason that I used Gmail was speed and storage. The very reason that I left…

I'm an ex Google Apps user and now a happy FastMail user. I left Gmail for many reasons, some technical (poor IMAP support, unhappy with the available clients) and some ideological (I don't want to vote with my wallet for monocultures). However ... > Have your own domain for emails Gmail allows you to own your domain. You just subscribe for Google Apps, at $5 / user / month, which is reasonable. > If you don't pay fo…

Excellent points. I really like your reinterpretation as "a zero price tag is...subsidized with something else...The cost is lock-in." It is definitely more accurate with respect to Google Inc. Though to my ears it sounds like a more generalized version of "if you are not paying for it, you are the product." But don't we almost always think of Google when quoting this line anyway?

Android has bad IMAP support -- is this a limitation of Android, or of IMAP? (are there push notifications for iOS?) IMAP has been a thorn in my side for ever, but I assumed that was the fault of an old outdated protocol?

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