11 ms·

Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web!

188 points by technicalfault 12y ago

ljoshua 12y ago
Doesn't directly address the original author's concern, but he ought to try Boxer--similar application, does support IMAP.
ebbv 12y ago
Mailbox is a product made by Gmail users targeting other Gmail users who want a specifically improved experience. They weren't targeting just generic "email" users. This isn't a flaw in their design any more than it's a flaw in the design of a Porsche 911 that it can't haul your new dining room set in the back. As 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.
- onion2k 12y ago
  The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture. 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.
  - ebbv 12y ago
    > Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, 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.
    - eterm 12y ago
      Usenet didn't die because of signal to noise, it died because over the history of the internet people have been moving from communication to broadcast. (Mail -> Usenet -> Web Forums -> Facebook -> Twitter). Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.
      - ebbv 12y ago
        Err, no. Your analogy sounds great but doesn't hold up at all. 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.
- onli 12y ago
  You are free to disagree of course, but it is not silly. Centralizing into a locked garden or into an established monopol-like platform has negative aspects to the field as a whole. Just look at RSS before the google reader shutdown and compare to now. 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.
  - ebbv 12y ago
    I am against Google replacing IMAP with their own API (and yes I know they aren't removing IMAP support yet.) 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.
    - deong 12y ago
      It's fine to criticize others for pursuing goals you think are actively harmful. Of course, nothing makes your criticism magically "correct", and everyone is free to have different opinions, but the fact that a design was intentional doesn't make it immune from criticism.
    - onli 12y ago
      > 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.
- eddieroger 12y ago
  I agreed with your first statement, but you lost me at the second and third. Only support Gmail and iCloud are red herrings for the real argument, which was that apps should support standards (in this case, IMAP) and not providers (Gmail, iCloud). As for AOL flooding the Internet with clueless people, for a lot of us without technical friends, AOL was our only gateway to the Internet. It sucked being in the garden, but it got us online, and eventually we broke free of the bubble. Sorry that we came for your BBSes, Usenet and IRC, but cultures change, and resisting that is a futile effort.
- malka 12y ago
  I'm a GMail user. I'd like an improved experience. I won't be using this product. In the future, I may want to change my mail provider. Using this tool will lock me with GMail or Apple mail. No thanks.
oldmanjay 12y ago
critics: stop telling me what to build. make it yourself if you feel so strongly
- EugeneOZ 12y ago
  especially when your site is so weak - can't even handle HN visitors (5-7k users is a very small traffic).
- pyre 12y ago
  critics: stop telling us how to do our jobs. perform sigint yourself if you feel so strongly. -- The NSA
- kubiiii 12y ago
  Don't put a bad restaurant review on yelp if you don't know how to cook. I understand that the difference here is that the reviewer is also a dev, but it does not change much since he put this up as a user.
  - eddieroger 12y ago
    It's the difference of saying that a restaurant makes bad food when you're a bad cook, versus saying a restaurant shouldn't be vegan-only because as a crappy cook, you want people to be omnivores. It wasn't a critique of Mailbox as an app (which the author actually seems to like), but a critique of the choices Mailbox made.
herghost 12y ago
Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same as building or 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!" 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.
- serf 12y ago
  The tool supports a walled garden at any point it requires its' user to use such a platform to interface with it.
- cabalamat 12y ago
  > Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same as building or supporting a walled garden. 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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- adamors 12y ago
  > That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is supporting a walled garden!" 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.
kraigspear 12y ago
Minimal Viable Feature Set. Support those well, decide later if it makes business sense to support others.
- herghost 12y ago
  Yes! Unless, whilst we're here, we just stop releasing anything at all until it's absolutely perfect and implements all possible features in all possible scenarios across all possible platforms from day 1. Anything less is building a walled garden!
- wmf 12y ago
  The elephant in the room here is that openness doesn't make business sense given the current state of the industry.
bfwi 12y ago
I don't know why the developer of Mailbox decided to only support Gmail and Apple iCloud. But I do know that making an IMAP client is extremely painful. I once had to, and I can't remember having to deal with a more confusing or frustrating interface.
- yoz-y 12y ago
  I do not have the numbers but significant amount of iOS users have Gmail or iCloud mail accounts. Mailbox was originally only for iOS and Gmail, later they have added iCloud, later they have added Android. Maybe in some time IMAP will be added as well. But it is sure as hell more viable to start with something that covers enough users to keep the lights going before trying to do everything.
- thehal84 12y ago
  I concur. I had to test a new IMAP Server for a Linux distro years ago, a lot of complexity.
- kps 12y ago
  POP is pretty darn simple though. I used to read mail, when away from home, using 'telnet mail.example.com 110'.
ris 12y ago
Technically email isn't the web. 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It's a shame, because we could have lots of little, highly interlinked, clouds, not one massive one.
  - danbruc 12y ago
    That's the same as with SOA - sounds awesome on the paper but just does not work well in practice. You can have one standard for linking all the things together on paper, but in reality you will get ten slightly incompatible implementations all with their own quirks and enhancements and extensions and suddenly integrating them is all but fun.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      If SOA doesn't work for you, you aren't doing enough of it ;-). 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.
- Already__Taken 12y ago
  > The reality of "the cloud" is we're squeezing things back into a few giant silos. 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.
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  Firms advertizing their presence on Facebook and Twitter took a while to catch on. It's an interesting way to stay connected since websites don't do that (and RSS never caught on with non-techies outside of certain applications like podcasts and people are loath to give out their emails for monthly newsletters). Unfortunately, you have to pay for every posting on Facebook for your 'subscribers' to be able to see it.
jacquesm 12y ago
AOL was successful for a reason: It made this complex stuff simple. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you want users to be free from silos then you're going to have to find a way to make it easier for them rather than to tell them they should abandon these services and accept the complexity. Integrated services can offer a level of simplicity to their users that is very hard to achieve in a decentralized manner.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  When I introduced ny grandmother to the Internet, I gave her AOL because it was supposed to be "easy." She hated it, and switched to a regular ISP with Netscape for mail and browsing. This was a woman who struggled to even use a mouse, though she was very smart. 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.
jhwhite 12y ago
I don't see Mailbox AOL-izing the web. I do see ISP attempting to do this. 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.
leephillips 12y ago
A few points that seem to make the author's argument stronger: 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. [0] http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/ http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
- claudius 12y ago
  What sort of IP do you have? If it is some residential IP where the PTR does not match the mailserver’s advertised hostname or the PTR does not resolve to the IP, I can fully understand blocking that IP (and do so myself). 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.
  - stonogo 12y ago
    AOL employs the sort of bad administration that blocks entire IP ranges. They've tried to make their blacklist tools smarter than they are capable of supporting. This is just one of many ways AOL's email service has been subpar, stretching back to day one.
    - claudius 12y ago
      Ah, that’s indeed a silly thing to do; thanks for the warning! :)
everydaypanos 12y ago
Point about IMAP is right on. All else is utter nonsense. Author mistakenly assumes that user experience plus features carries on to IMAP which is..wrong.
atoponce 12y ago
So, let me get this straight. You're upset, because a proprietary software application that supports proprietary protocols from proprietary service providers, is not using open standards? If only there was a solution...
- antocv 12y ago
  What would you possibly be insinuating atoponce? Thoughts of opennes and freedom? Some GNUs running around in my head, are you suggesting freedom in our IT world?
- teacup50 12y ago
  Proprietary software and proprietary standards are not the same thing.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    They tend to go hand-in-hand, though.
thehal84 12y ago
Perhaps the author fails to see that introducing more functionality is additional support. A developer or team has to now support and bugfix more then just Gmail and iCloud which already hits 80% of the market share for this use case. Just my $0.02.
tomasien 12y ago
I'm not 100% sure but I thought Mailbox needed access to certain things that are outside IMAP to do what it does. For instance, it makes its own folder in Gmail that it interacts with, and I'm not 100% sure if "Archive" is a standard IMAP function. 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.
- rcamera 12y ago
  K-9 mail on Android uses IMAP and it creates new folders, as well as archive my email to my "Archive" folder without a problem. There should be absolutely no reason a mail application couldn't use IMAP to communicate with mail servers.
chimeracoder 12y ago
> Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way. 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.
PeterGriffin 12y ago
IMAP was created in 1986. 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.
- nabla9 12y ago
  Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. 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.
  - LordKano 12y ago
    That, sadly, is why I am not longer an Apple user. 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.
  - nemothekid 12y ago
    >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. 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?
adventured 12y ago
It's perfectly logical for this cycle to be occurring. 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.
mbesto 12y ago
I'm not sure what the author's gripe is. First, if you don't like walled gardens then simply don't use them. Second, if you're adamant they shouldn't exist, then why not roll your open source alternative? Good luck with trying to get "dumb" users to adopt your solution.
Spooky23 12y ago
They do this for good reason -- dealing with the various dysfunctional IMAP implementations out there makes your product look lousy and costs alot of time & treasure to support. When some squeaky wheel blogger with a screwed up IMAP server writes a ten page rant about why you suck, nobody gets the other side of the story. 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.
- ethomson 12y ago
  Thank you. As soon as I read "open, well-documented and well-understood platform like email" I laughed, but only because what I really wanted to do was cry. I assume that the author had never had the misfortune of trying to build a MUA or MTA that had to be widely compatible with other implementations. If you have the option of talking only to Gmail and still being successful? Yes.
  - MetaCosm 12y ago
    Exactly -- I worked on IMAP related nonsense for about 18 months -- it is a special, broken type of hell.
    - ethomson 12y ago
      Then, god forbid it works well enough to get a message from the server. Now you have to deal with trash like quoted printable, which is neither.
- hannibalhorn 12y ago
  I think it's high time to revise the IMAP/SMTP interface for clients anyway; the JMAP spec that fastmail has put together is pretty interesting: http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/ 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.
epaga 12y ago
As the developer of a similar iPhone app which was GMail only (EmptyInbox), let me just say: IMAP is really, really hard to get right. Each different mail provider is different and nobody is keeping all the rules. Even Google had a few hacky differences to the "official" IMAP way of doing things. 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...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
shmerl 12y ago
Same thing goes about instant messengers. I wish developers would stop producing junk like Whatsapp which AOL-izes the Web and would use standard, interoperable and federated protocols.
- wmf 12y ago
  VCs invest in monopolies, not (actual) openness.
bane 12y ago
Users are a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are highly technical users who spend all day not minding spending all day dealing with hostile and spiteful interfaces to get trivial tasks done - there are very few of these people in the world. As you progressively work your way down the pyramid users become progressively less inclined to tolerate this nonsense and the number of people in that segment grows. 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." 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.

188 points by technicalfault 12y ago

Doesn't directly address the original author's concern, but he ought to try Boxer--similar application, does support IMAP.

ebbv 12y ago

Mailbox is a product made by Gmail users targeting other Gmail users who want a specifically improved experience. They weren't targeting just generic "email" users. This isn't a flaw in their design any more than it's a flaw in the design of a Porsche 911 that it can't haul your new dining room set in the back. As 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.

onion2k 12y ago
The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture. 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.
- ebbv 12y ago
  > Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, 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.
  - eterm 12y ago
    Usenet didn't die because of signal to noise, it died because over the history of the internet people have been moving from communication to broadcast. (Mail -> Usenet -> Web Forums -> Facebook -> Twitter). Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.
    - ebbv 12y ago
      Err, no. Your analogy sounds great but doesn't hold up at all. 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.
onli 12y ago
You are free to disagree of course, but it is not silly. Centralizing into a locked garden or into an established monopol-like platform has negative aspects to the field as a whole. Just look at RSS before the google reader shutdown and compare to now. 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.
- ebbv 12y ago
  I am against Google replacing IMAP with their own API (and yes I know they aren't removing IMAP support yet.) 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.
  - deong 12y ago
    It's fine to criticize others for pursuing goals you think are actively harmful. Of course, nothing makes your criticism magically "correct", and everyone is free to have different opinions, but the fact that a design was intentional doesn't make it immune from criticism.
  - onli 12y ago
    > 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.
eddieroger 12y ago
I agreed with your first statement, but you lost me at the second and third. Only support Gmail and iCloud are red herrings for the real argument, which was that apps should support standards (in this case, IMAP) and not providers (Gmail, iCloud). As for AOL flooding the Internet with clueless people, for a lot of us without technical friends, AOL was our only gateway to the Internet. It sucked being in the garden, but it got us online, and eventually we broke free of the bubble. Sorry that we came for your BBSes, Usenet and IRC, but cultures change, and resisting that is a futile effort.
malka 12y ago
I'm a GMail user. I'd like an improved experience. I won't be using this product. In the future, I may want to change my mail provider. Using this tool will lock me with GMail or Apple mail. No thanks.

oldmanjay 12y ago

critics: stop telling me what to build. make it yourself if you feel so strongly

EugeneOZ 12y ago
especially when your site is so weak - can't even handle HN visitors (5-7k users is a very small traffic).
pyre 12y ago
critics: stop telling us how to do our jobs. perform sigint yourself if you feel so strongly. -- The NSA
kubiiii 12y ago
Don't put a bad restaurant review on yelp if you don't know how to cook. I understand that the difference here is that the reviewer is also a dev, but it does not change much since he put this up as a user.
- eddieroger 12y ago
  It's the difference of saying that a restaurant makes bad food when you're a bad cook, versus saying a restaurant shouldn't be vegan-only because as a crappy cook, you want people to be omnivores. It wasn't a critique of Mailbox as an app (which the author actually seems to like), but a critique of the choices Mailbox made.

herghost 12y ago

Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same as building or 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!" 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.

serf 12y ago
The tool supports a walled garden at any point it requires its' user to use such a platform to interface with it.
cabalamat 12y ago
> Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same as building or supporting a walled garden. 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
adamors 12y ago
> That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is supporting a walled garden!" 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.

kraigspear 12y ago

Minimal Viable Feature Set. Support those well, decide later if it makes business sense to support others.

herghost 12y ago
Yes! Unless, whilst we're here, we just stop releasing anything at all until it's absolutely perfect and implements all possible features in all possible scenarios across all possible platforms from day 1. Anything less is building a walled garden!
wmf 12y ago
The elephant in the room here is that openness doesn't make business sense given the current state of the industry.

bfwi 12y ago

I don't know why the developer of Mailbox decided to only support Gmail and Apple iCloud. But I do know that making an IMAP client is extremely painful. I once had to, and I can't remember having to deal with a more confusing or frustrating interface.

yoz-y 12y ago
I do not have the numbers but significant amount of iOS users have Gmail or iCloud mail accounts. Mailbox was originally only for iOS and Gmail, later they have added iCloud, later they have added Android. Maybe in some time IMAP will be added as well. But it is sure as hell more viable to start with something that covers enough users to keep the lights going before trying to do everything.
thehal84 12y ago
I concur. I had to test a new IMAP Server for a Linux distro years ago, a lot of complexity.
kps 12y ago
POP is pretty darn simple though. I used to read mail, when away from home, using 'telnet mail.example.com 110'.

ris 12y ago

Technically email isn't the web. 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.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
It's a shame, because we could have lots of little, highly interlinked, clouds, not one massive one.
- danbruc 12y ago
  That's the same as with SOA - sounds awesome on the paper but just does not work well in practice. You can have one standard for linking all the things together on paper, but in reality you will get ten slightly incompatible implementations all with their own quirks and enhancements and extensions and suddenly integrating them is all but fun.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    If SOA doesn't work for you, you aren't doing enough of it ;-). 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.
Already__Taken 12y ago
> The reality of "the cloud" is we're squeezing things back into a few giant silos. 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.
JohnTHaller 12y ago
Firms advertizing their presence on Facebook and Twitter took a while to catch on. It's an interesting way to stay connected since websites don't do that (and RSS never caught on with non-techies outside of certain applications like podcasts and people are loath to give out their emails for monthly newsletters). Unfortunately, you have to pay for every posting on Facebook for your 'subscribers' to be able to see it.

jacquesm 12y ago

AOL was successful for a reason: It made this complex stuff simple. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you want users to be free from silos then you're going to have to find a way to make it easier for them rather than to tell them they should abandon these services and accept the complexity. Integrated services can offer a level of simplicity to their users that is very hard to achieve in a decentralized manner.

nitrogen 12y ago
When I introduced ny grandmother to the Internet, I gave her AOL because it was supposed to be "easy." She hated it, and switched to a regular ISP with Netscape for mail and browsing. This was a woman who struggled to even use a mouse, though she was very smart. 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.

jhwhite 12y ago

I don't see Mailbox AOL-izing the web. I do see ISP attempting to do this. 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.

leephillips 12y ago

A few points that seem to make the author's argument stronger: 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. [0] http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/ http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/

claudius 12y ago
What sort of IP do you have? If it is some residential IP where the PTR does not match the mailserver’s advertised hostname or the PTR does not resolve to the IP, I can fully understand blocking that IP (and do so myself). 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.
- stonogo 12y ago
  AOL employs the sort of bad administration that blocks entire IP ranges. They've tried to make their blacklist tools smarter than they are capable of supporting. This is just one of many ways AOL's email service has been subpar, stretching back to day one.
  - claudius 12y ago
    Ah, that’s indeed a silly thing to do; thanks for the warning! :)

everydaypanos 12y ago

Point about IMAP is right on. All else is utter nonsense. Author mistakenly assumes that user experience plus features carries on to IMAP which is..wrong.

atoponce 12y ago

So, let me get this straight. You're upset, because a proprietary software application that supports proprietary protocols from proprietary service providers, is not using open standards? If only there was a solution...

antocv 12y ago
What would you possibly be insinuating atoponce? Thoughts of opennes and freedom? Some GNUs running around in my head, are you suggesting freedom in our IT world?
teacup50 12y ago
Proprietary software and proprietary standards are not the same thing.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  They tend to go hand-in-hand, though.

thehal84 12y ago

Perhaps the author fails to see that introducing more functionality is additional support. A developer or team has to now support and bugfix more then just Gmail and iCloud which already hits 80% of the market share for this use case. Just my $0.02.

tomasien 12y ago

I'm not 100% sure but I thought Mailbox needed access to certain things that are outside IMAP to do what it does. For instance, it makes its own folder in Gmail that it interacts with, and I'm not 100% sure if "Archive" is a standard IMAP function. 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.

rcamera 12y ago
K-9 mail on Android uses IMAP and it creates new folders, as well as archive my email to my "Archive" folder without a problem. There should be absolutely no reason a mail application couldn't use IMAP to communicate with mail servers.

chimeracoder 12y ago

> Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way. 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.

PeterGriffin 12y ago

IMAP was created in 1986. 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.

nabla9 12y ago
Progress for the sake of progress is not progress. 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.
- LordKano 12y ago
  That, sadly, is why I am not longer an Apple user. 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.
- nemothekid 12y ago
  >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. 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?

adventured 12y ago

It's perfectly logical for this cycle to be occurring. 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.

mbesto 12y ago

I'm not sure what the author's gripe is. First, if you don't like walled gardens then simply don't use them. Second, if you're adamant they shouldn't exist, then why not roll your open source alternative? Good luck with trying to get "dumb" users to adopt your solution.

Spooky23 12y ago

They do this for good reason -- dealing with the various dysfunctional IMAP implementations out there makes your product look lousy and costs alot of time & treasure to support. When some squeaky wheel blogger with a screwed up IMAP server writes a ten page rant about why you suck, nobody gets the other side of the story. 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.

ethomson 12y ago
Thank you. As soon as I read "open, well-documented and well-understood platform like email" I laughed, but only because what I really wanted to do was cry. I assume that the author had never had the misfortune of trying to build a MUA or MTA that had to be widely compatible with other implementations. If you have the option of talking only to Gmail and still being successful? Yes.
- MetaCosm 12y ago
  Exactly -- I worked on IMAP related nonsense for about 18 months -- it is a special, broken type of hell.
  - ethomson 12y ago
    Then, god forbid it works well enough to get a message from the server. Now you have to deal with trash like quoted printable, which is neither.
hannibalhorn 12y ago
I think it's high time to revise the IMAP/SMTP interface for clients anyway; the JMAP spec that fastmail has put together is pretty interesting: http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/ 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.

epaga 12y ago

As the developer of a similar iPhone app which was GMail only (EmptyInbox), let me just say: IMAP is really, really hard to get right. Each different mail provider is different and nobody is keeping all the rules. Even Google had a few hacky differences to the "official" IMAP way of doing things. 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...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

shmerl 12y ago

Same thing goes about instant messengers. I wish developers would stop producing junk like Whatsapp which AOL-izes the Web and would use standard, interoperable and federated protocols.

wmf 12y ago
VCs invest in monopolies, not (actual) openness.

bane 12y ago

Users are a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are highly technical users who spend all day not minding spending all day dealing with hostile and spiteful interfaces to get trivial tasks done - there are very few of these people in the world. As you progressively work your way down the pyramid users become progressively less inclined to tolerate this nonsense and the number of people in that segment grows. 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." 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.