Bringing the Power of AMP to Gmail
This new spec will be a powerful way for developers to create more engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.
For example, imagine you could complete tasks directly in email. With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right from the email message. Many people rely on email for information about flights, events, news, purchases and beyond—more than 270 billion emails are sent each day! AMP for Email will also make it possible for information to easily kept up-to-date, so emails never get stale and the content is accurate when a user looks at it.
Please don’t allow Google to subsume (even more of) the open web in exchange for “more interactive and engaging” emails.
Devin Coldewey (via Hacker News):
The moat between communication and action is important because it makes it very clear what certain tools are capable of, which in turn lets them be trusted and used properly.
We know that all an email can ever do is say something to you (tracking pixels and read receipts notwithstanding). It doesn’t download anything on its own, it doesn’t run any apps or scripts, attachments are discrete items, unless they’re images in the HTML, which is itself optional. Ultimately the whole package is always just going to be a big, static chunk of text sent to you, with the occasional file riding shotgun. Open it a year or ten from now and it’s the same email.
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What Google wants to do is bridge that moat, essentially to allow applications to run inside emails, limited ones to be sure, but by definition the kind of thing that belongs on the other side of the moat.
[…]
Ads and trackers that adapt themselves to the content around them, the data they know about the viewer, and the latest pricing or promotions. That’s how Google wants to “modernize” your inbox.
Does “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences” ring a little different now?
Of course, there’s a good chance the advanced capabilities of this format won’t catch on because email clients are already pretty fragmented as things stand today. It’s an area of the web where the lowest common denominators — HTML tables and old-school tags like
<font>— are used with disturbing regularity, simply because it’s the only markup that works well in all clients.
Tim Kadlec (via Hacker News):
So, to recap, the web community has stated over and over again that we’re not comfortable with Google incentivizing the use of AMP with search engine carrots. In response, Google has provided yet another search engine carrot for AMP.
This wouldn’t bother me if AMP was open about what it is: a tool for folks to optimize their search engine placement. But of course, that’s not the claim. The claim is that AMP is “for the open web.” There are a lot of good folks working on AMP. I’ve met and talked with many of them numerous times and they’re doing amazing technical work. But the way the project is being positioned right now is disingenuous.
If AMP is truly for the open web, de-couple it from Google search entirely. It has no business there.
Update (2018-02-19): Jason Rodriguez (Hacker News):
As an email geek, I’m liable to disagree with a lot talk in the web world but not in this case. I think AMP for Email is a bad idea. An interesting idea with some cool demos, sure, but poorly executed by Google.
