
Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web! - technicalfault
http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/
======
ris
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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>Technically email isn't the web.

I see this very same things on the web. Heaven forbid you use internet
explorer as your browser or are a version behind. The amount of smarmy, "Use a
real browser" messages I've gotten when testing things in IE is unacceptable.
I have no love for IE, but lots of people use it, and I need to support it at
work. Just because its difficult to write html for for certain use cases
doesn't mean its useless. I understand when using something IE doesnt support
yet, but that didn't seem to be the case with these websites. Often these
sites are run by 20-somethings straight out of school with some kind of 'stick
it to the man' identity politics. Yeah if you're a middle class person who
went to college, have healthcare, have a non back-breaking computer job, etc
guess what, you're the man.

I feel like we've never transcended the proprietary mindset and popularity
still rules. This email client may be an extreme example, but the web is
pretty unfriendly if you're not using firefox or a webkit based browser. Oh,
the opposite was true in the past? So what. That doesn't make the current
status quo acceptable. I love how we justify the various ways we refuse to
learn from history.

On mobile its even worse. We're not even shoving things into silos. We're
saying, "Look, this featureset which could be trivially be put into a HTML5
webpage is now a local app proprietary to this platform. Install it, deal with
its constant updates, its crappy UI, etc." Does every newspaper in the world
and forum really think I want to install their app? I'd have hundreds of apps
on my phone if I did.

I really think we're regressing a bit. The cloud-ification and foolproofing of
things just leads to a handful of megacorps providing near-mandatory services
and applying their own policies and politics onto those services. We keep
losing ground to them on things like privacy, stability, ownership, etc for
convenience. Not sure where this is going to lead to in the end, but it won't
be anything like we're used to. I doubt it'll be for the better. MSN and AOL
tried to build a walled web garden in the 90s and were laughed at by the tech-
savvy. Now the tech-savvy are the ones sporting ipads and android phones and
willingly entering these new walled gardens.

~~~
nemothekid
Your rant about IE is strange given that IE, a for a long time, was
nonstandard. Think about it, you are asking developers to support a non-
standard set of browsers to reach a "large" use base. How is that any
different from the guys at mailbox supporting a non-standard API to reach a
large user base?

The web looks fine in standard supporting browsers, and as of now that is
Gecko and Webkit browsers (which by the way make up 99% of OSS browsers, like
Midori and IceCat). Most of the other non-Gecko/Webkit browsers are Trident
based, closed source, and only support Windows.

Using the web is a bad example for showing that there is a "proprietary
mindset", when in fact all the standards about the web are completely open.

~~~
rwallace
There's an important distinction that needs to be drawn here.

It's perfectly okay to say 'we support modern standards, older versions of IE
don't comply with modern standards so if you use IE, you need to upgrade to a
recent version'.

It's not okay to say 'you can't use even recent versions of IE because we
don't like the brand name'.

(I think it is the former rather than the latter that people are generally
doing, but it's worth clarifying the distinction.)

------
Spooky23
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
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
Exactly -- I worked on IMAP related nonsense for about 18 months -- it is a
special, broken type of hell.

~~~
ethomson
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.

------
bfwi
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
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.

------
leephillips
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
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
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
Ah, that’s indeed a silly thing to do; thanks for the warning! :)

------
herghost
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.

~~~
cabalamat
> 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.

------
epaga
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...

------
atoponce
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...

~~~
teacup50
Proprietary software and proprietary standards are not the same thing.

~~~
yellowapple
They tend to go hand-in-hand, though.

------
chimeracoder
> 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.

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

~~~
wmf
The elephant in the room here is that openness doesn't make business sense
given the current state of the industry.

------
jacquesm
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
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.

------
adventured
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.

------
thehal84
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
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
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.

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

------
mbesto
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.

------
jhwhite
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.

------
shmerl
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
VCs invest in monopolies, not (actual) openness.

------
everydaypanos
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.

------
bane
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.

~~~
rwallace
I don't think this comment deserved downvotes, because it makes an important
point. If we want to preserve open standards - and I definitely do - then
using them has to be straightforward. Think about it: how many of us grow our
own food, generator own electricity, dig our own wells? Damn few. We subscribe
to the big central services for the things we consume, because life is short.
We cannot expect other professions to grant us special consideration that we
don't grant to others.

~~~
bane
Right. If the standard that we apply to computing were applied everywhere
else, we'd all be sitting at home spinning fabric from the wool we just
sheered from our goats that we raised with the crops we just harvested.

Nobody does that because it's not a good way to do things.

One of the problems that tech people have is they get mired down in the
details, seeing each step as some kind of accomplishment, when each step is
just a necessary part of the whole. Raising a crop from seed to harvest isn't
easy, but the goal is to have clothes -- yet tech people will spend an
impossibly enormous amount of time on tweaking the harvesting process when
it's all just going to end up as wool underpants in the end.

And of course, downvotes because I'm supplying uncomfortable facts about
population distributions that every marketer on the planet knows.

------
PeterGriffin
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
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.

~~~
nemothekid
>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?

~~~
avz
This doesn't make sense.

Mailbox only works with Gmail and iCloud Mail. Gmail supports OAuth2.0 [0]
while iCloud does not [1,2]. On the other hand, Outlook supports OAuth2.0 [3]
and is not supported by Mailbox.

Thus, even if the choice of the authors of Mailbox gave them some edge, it is
surely not the one you described.

[0]
[https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol](https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol)
[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18649352/is-there-an-
iclo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18649352/is-there-an-icloud-web-
api) [2] [http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/01/apps-ask-icloud-
password-...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/01/apps-ask-icloud-password-
privacy-threat.html) [3] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/dn440163](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn440163)

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

~~~
kubiiii
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
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.

------
ebbv
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
_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
> 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
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
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.

