I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
My reaction to this surprised me: I was repelled
I imagine this is what it feels like when you’re on a phone call with someone and towards the end of the call you hear a distinct flushing sound.
This anthology of Steve Jobs interviews, announcements and emails is available to read for free as a nicely typeset web book.
Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.
The day we started to allow email clients to be full-blown web browsers (but without the protections of browsers) was the day we lost — time, security, privacy, and effectiveness. Now we spend all our time fighting with the materials of an email (i.e. color and layout) rather than refining its substance (i.e. story and language).
I must remember to try this out-of-office email strategy.
Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.
Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.
I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.
He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.
Denise shares a cautionary tale of service design gone wrong.
Receive one email a day for 30 days, each featuring at least one HTML element.
Right up my alley!
The Right Number is a gentle, noncommercial space where your only job is to be yourself. Upon dialing you’ll be connected to a voicemail box and given a brief prompt. You have three minutes to answer however you’d like.
I use Apple’s Mail app for my email so this is very handy:
An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.
Thirty years later, it is easy to overlook the web’s origins as a tool for sharing knowledge. Key to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision were open standards that reflected his belief in the Rule of Least Power, a principle that choosing the simplest and least powerful language for a given purpose allows you to do more with the data stored in that language (thus, HTML is easier for humans or machines to interpret and analyze than PostScript). Along with open standards and the Rule of Least Power, Tim Berners-Lee wanted to make it easy for anyone to publish information in the form of web pages. His first web browser, named Nexus, was both a browser and editor.
A service that—amongst other things—allows you to read newsletters in your RSS reader.
This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:
scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]
There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:
Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.
Mike follows up on the changes made by email startup Superhuman after his initial post:
I will say this: if you were skeptical of Superhuman’s commitment to privacy and safety after reading the last article, you should probably be even more skeptical after these changes. The company’s efforts demonstrate a desire to tamp down liability and damage to their brand, but they do not show an understanding of the core problem: you should not build software that surreptitiously collects data on people in a way that would surprise and frighten them.
A really excellent analysis by Mike of a dark pattern in the Superhuman email app.
That’s right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email.
Exactly! This violates the principle of least surprise. Also, it’s just plain wrong.
Amazingly though, Mike has been getting pushback from guys on Twitter (and it’s always guys) who don’t think this is a big deal.
Anyway, read the whole thing—it’s fair, balanced, and really well written.
Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.
Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.
I feel vindicated.
People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.
This seems like a plausable explanation:
Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.
Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.
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The Training Commission is a speculative fiction email newsletter about the compromises and consequences of using technology to reckon with collective trauma. Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.
After musing on newsletters, Craig shares how he’s feeling about Instagram and its ilk:
Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.
I’ve found this cycle has fomented another emotion beyond distrust, one I’ve felt most acutely in 2018: Disdain? (Feels too loaded.) Disappointment? (Too moralistic.) Wariness? (Yes!) Yes — wariness over the way social networks and the publishing platforms they provide shift and shimmy beneath our feet, how the algorithms now show posts of X quality first, or then Y quality first, or how, for example, Instagram seems to randomly show you the first image of a multi-image sequence or, no wait, the second.8
I try to be deliberate, and social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do. Which, to someone who, you know, gives a shit, is pretty dang insulting.
Wariness is insidious because it breeds weariness. A person can get tired just opening an app these days. Unpredictable is the last thing a publishing platform should be but is exactly what these social networks become. Which can make them great marketing tools, but perhaps less-than-ideal for publishing.