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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" us

by 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.
- marrs 12y ago
  I can't speak about AOL because I never used it, but I imagine the parent is talking about how apps like Outlook killed email conversation threads. [Edit: apparently that's not what parent was talking about, but I'm happy to take the opportunity to rant about a pet gripe anyway]. Far from simplifying email, they took a fairly straight forward system and complicated it to the point that nobody understood how to use it any more. Specifically, they made conversations almost impossible to have by making top posting of replies the default, coercing the user into a behavior model that was contrary to the best practices that had been established by users of email to that point. The predictable result of this is that people stopped bottom posting and conversation threads were made practically impossible. I wouldn't be surprised if this is why forums took over from mailing lists. I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why Gmail became so popular, because it fixed a problem that should never have existed: it made conversations comprehensible again. So while I wouldn't blame newbies for breaking email, there is definitely a strong correlation, and it's because of the inadequate tools they were provided with in those early days.
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    I've never been sold on the bottom-reply. Sure, if you're new to the thread it becomes easier to follow from the last, but if you're following from the first message it's a pain to scroll down to the bottom of every message to get what's new. I would say I haven't seen an argument to convince me bottom-replys are better, but I honestly have never really discussed this with someone who cared.
    - stonogo 12y ago
      Part of the etiquette of email, before gmail arrived and did everything for you, was that you elided irrelevant parts of email quotes. You don't leave the entire thread in situ; you only quote the parts of the message you are specifically respond to, or that are material to understanding the exchange. The massive pile of shit problem is new to Outlook and Gmail.
      - jimktrains2 12y ago
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.

by ebbv 12y ago

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.
marrs 12y ago
I can't speak about AOL because I never used it, but I imagine the parent is talking about how apps like Outlook killed email conversation threads. [Edit: apparently that's not what parent was talking about, but I'm happy to take the opportunity to rant about a pet gripe anyway]. Far from simplifying email, they took a fairly straight forward system and complicated it to the point that nobody understood how to use it any more. Specifically, they made conversations almost impossible to have by making top posting of replies the default, coercing the user into a behavior model that was contrary to the best practices that had been established by users of email to that point. The predictable result of this is that people stopped bottom posting and conversation threads were made practically impossible. I wouldn't be surprised if this is why forums took over from mailing lists. I also wouldn't be surprised if this is why Gmail became so popular, because it fixed a problem that should never have existed: it made conversations comprehensible again. So while I wouldn't blame newbies for breaking email, there is definitely a strong correlation, and it's because of the inadequate tools they were provided with in those early days.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  I've never been sold on the bottom-reply. Sure, if you're new to the thread it becomes easier to follow from the last, but if you're following from the first message it's a pain to scroll down to the bottom of every message to get what's new. I would say I haven't seen an argument to convince me bottom-replys are better, but I honestly have never really discussed this with someone who cared.
  - stonogo 12y ago
    Part of the etiquette of email, before gmail arrived and did everything for you, was that you elided irrelevant parts of email quotes. You don't leave the entire thread in situ; you only quote the parts of the message you are specifically respond to, or that are material to understanding the exchange. The massive pile of shit problem is new to Outlook and Gmail.
    - jimktrains2 12y ago

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.