AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive

> They used the example, you send an email that says lets meet for dinner tonight at 6. You arrive and after 30 minutes begin to wonder, go back to your email and now it says meet "tommorow night" at 6. Are you crazy? Did you misremember? Or did the sender change the email after they sent it and you read it? How could you complain?

This is a calendar invite. And this is a completely valid use case, but it's useless if I don't have an edit log. It's crazy how many people miss that last part.

It's probably going to be even worse than that - HR (and everyone else) will probably then have to implement process and procedure and storage mechanisms to prove that emails have not been changed. This might mean storing emails in a document control system. Email is bad enough but now we're all going to have to keep a mirror in SharePoint or something like that.

FWIW, as far as I'm aware, it wasn't gmail scraping that was the cause of Amazon pulling that information. It was third-party plugins that read people's inboxes to provide them with coupons, discounts, etc., and those companies would sometimes sell the pricing data. I assume Amazon wasn't thrilled about that, but there wasn't anything they (or gmail) could do about it as long as the user was granting them access to their inbox.

But also - I just ordered something off of amazon and I noticed that the confirmation had the item that I ordered in it, albeit in a shortened/summarized way? So maybe they brought it back, figuring that with just part of the name, there's not much someone can do with the pricing information? Or maybe they just don't care anymore?

(disclosure: I work at google, but not on this, but worked adjacent to the gmail team for a few years and am going off of my memory. I'll also tap the sign that Google doesn't mine your gmail for ads, for both consumer AND paying customers).

When reconciling my budget (with YNAB) I often use gmail as my way to connect items to transactions [0]. I've found that I can just search for the amount that my card was charged in my email and find the Amazon email that relates to that order. Then, normally from the body, there is just barely enough information for me to know what I bought.

That got annoying enough that I just wrote a chrome extension to scrape Amazon orders/transactions and auto-match and update my YNAB memo line with a summary of the items.

That's a bit of a tangent just to say: yes, they nerfed their emails but not completely.

[0] Yes, YNAB recommends that you enter transactions right as you make them, but that's not how I use it.

Gmail has always scraped emails. That was in the TOS from day one. Your data was the price for the free service.

Sure, I can download it if they send it as an attachment. Not so easy when it's an external reference. I guess I could login to the website and download... the web page? Well anyway I'm not going to.

I agree, the ship sailed a long time ago. I have been archiving my emails since the 90s. Sometime around 2010 all the remotely loading emails came along, and since then I've several times gone back to look at an invite or announcement and find nothing but an html tag. I guess an archiver that would need print all my emails to a pdf or image file to preserve it, like the emails that show up in litigation. The tools I was using, gmvault or google's takeout, aren't made for this path we're on.

Yes, of course, and that's why it's best not to put the important information into and image. Of course, many senders do this anyway, but at least it requires them to send me an image. No different really than sending me a link to the important information as I mentioned in my post.

But let's not make this even easier or default please. It's bad enough as-is.

A nice improvement would be for prominent clients like gmail to default to NOT display images. This would force bulk-senders (including legitimate ones) to stop putting the important info in images most of the time.

Ditto with links - maybe the clients should stop making them clickable, forcing the user to copy-paste the link. Not sure about this one...

I remember AOL email to AOL email had an "unsend" feature for a while.

I agree wholeheartedly -- it's like getting a postcard saying "You have an important message from your doctor, go visit the doctor's office to find out what."

I respect that some of this is ass-covering because of overreaching regulation (or in many cases probably overly-conservative readings of the vague regulations) especially with respect to HIPAA and Euro-style "Privacy" legislation, but personally I'd prefer to opt-out of all types of nanny-ism trying to 'protect my privacy' by sending me content-free email with links, that then require that I 'click to view' and then, 90% of the time now, return to my fucking email to retrieve a stupid code.

The second problem is deliverability: more than enough email providers still have laughably low limits (sometimes < 3MB)

What are you sending that 3MB for an email is "low"? The Bible is a little over 4MB of plain text.

I hate these EU requirements. They do nothing to help real users, and really make everything worse. Like, is it helpful that every single website now has an added banner that we have to click, but which still nobody reads and doesn't really help anything? All to avoid cookies, which are not really the source of the problem these laws were meant to address? ARRRGHHH!

As far as the file size - does that critically important message need to be embedded in a 10MB PDF? Maybe we should go back to 50k limits and force them to put that one-liner in plain text in the email. ARRRGHHH!

And get off my lawn! ARRRGHHH

Yep. I totally see why they did it. It’s a user focus, not developer focus. Users just want faster webpages. The end.

Why couldn't they just directly downrank pages based on their size or load time?

>without AMP we get downranked in Google

Whether a site used AMP did not affect ranking in Google.

It's "accelerated mobile pages" but I love the abuse version.

It wasn't innovative or intended to be, it was a solution to a collective action problem. It's easy to make the case for "we have to do it this way to avoid being penalized in search rankings".

With AMP, Google could preload and pre-render sites, so things like swiping through a carousel between search results was instant.

That’s not possible without building an AMP page since it requires being able to safely serve off of google’s domain.

With AMP, you basically get guard-rails to prevent your team of junior engineers from making your mobile pages too slow in exchange for increasing The Google's monopoly power. :D If I remember correctly, with AMP, you have to use their web components, and you have to pass their validator or pages won't be listed or cached at all. AMP is not really innovative in the slightest. One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to. The businesses that see engineering as a necessary evil are not properly incentivized to care about page performance, and are sometimes only prodded into doing so if a giant like The Google tells them to. Management tells their programmers that they read an article about AMP and that it makes pages load faster and reaches a wider search audience by caching and cutting out unnecessary crap; the more seasoned programmers think "Yeah, no shit – I've been trying to tell you... but I'll spend time rebuilding pages for AMP because I get paid the same either way."

The point of AMP was to force publishers to build non-bloated websites, because they weren't doing it of their own free will.

AMP is dead

AMP is a set of rules for people who are unable to stop themselves from making bad decisions. It has nothing to do with technical superiority. AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. There is nothing that stops you from creating an AMP-like experience if you are naturally not a jackass.

The innovation is that the page can be prerendered from cache without any privacy or analytics concerns. AMP is an open standard replacement for Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News Format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat

How would forking work? The whole point of AMP is that a cache can validate that it is safe to prerender. If you added your own stuff, the caches would just reject it.

If you swap out AMP for ${generic_tech} this statement seems to describe the latest 15 years of software development.

It was never user-hostile. It was definitely publisher hostile but that isn't the same thing.

Comparing XMPP/Matrix to Slack is like comparing Telnet to Chrome. Yes, they both display text, they're both interactive. But the latter has about 5,000x more features, which is why we all use it.

Yet with Slack, it doesn't use a standard. Could you build an app like Slack that includes XMPP/Matrix along with a whole lot of other stuff? Sure. But without the whole kitchen sink, you still don't have a standard other apps will follow. You have a proprietary app plus XMPP. Other apps won't be compatible with it. Which is the case with Slack's competitors.

Think of a web browser. It's larger than a kernel. It's probably the biggest, fattest, meatiest, most feature-rich application in the world. (And it should be, because it's a freakin' application platform at this point.) But it all runs on.... standards! Every part of it. I'm saying, do that, but for the massively feature-rich, complex, large, almost unwieldy, but insanely productive, communications platform that is Slack.

I get that a lot of people don't really understand what the big deal about Slack is. A lot of people thought the same thing about web browsers back in the day. But once they started using them a lot, they got it. It's not just a document viewer, just like Slack isn't just chat.

It really, really isn't.

> Replace it all with a standard. Let anyone implement the standard, implement a client, a server, etc. And let people choose the tooling they want - but while being interoperable with everyone else's.