JMAP

FastMail is proposing/developing a replacement for IMAP.

(IMAP is one of the protocols that many e-mail clients use to talk to e-mail servers. For instance, it is how my iPhone gets my e-mail for all my e-mail accounts.)

My first reaction was negative.

First, I’m not convinced that many of the innovations in e-mail are all that useful. Secondly, today’s climate seems so opposed to these kinds of standards, the seem stacked against it.

But IMAP has bigger problems than end-user features. IMAP has technical issues that keep it from being good at the things it does support. They’ve convinced me that JMAP makes sense.

The bigger issue here is that we seem to be moving further and further from interoperable standards. Companies claim that the standards keep them from innovating. But on the whole, I’m not seeing a lot of benefits to end users in trade for this lack of interoperability. Instead, lock-in seems to encourage companies to care less about what is good for their users.

I’m hoping JMAP will be able to buck that trend.

iPhone 3.0 Auto-Authentication with AT&T Wi-Fi

I typically don’t bother with free wi-fi hotspots. Why? Because they almost all require you to pull up a browser and jump through some hoops. Of course, if the network activity you are trying to do is not visiting a web site—like checking your e-mail—you’ll sit there wondering why the free wi-fi seems to be slower than the Edge network.

Even if you think to pull up Safari and jump through the hoops first, the whole process is still probably slower than having just checked your e-mail over the Edge.

Well, it seems that with the iPhone 3.0 firmware, AT&T has fixed that for their wi-fi hotspots—which are free for AT&T customers.

Zen and the Internet

Google’s putting a lot of thought into how to help people find the information they want. So, why not concentrate on our content and stop worrying about gaming the system?

Why can’t a blog just be a way to share our thoughts?

Why can’t we just use twitter to say what we’re doing?

Network neutrality

I’ve been a bit ambivalent about network neutrality. I already hate the fact that my ISP makes it difficult for me to connect to mail servers. (Blocking outbound connections to TCP port 25.) (I could—perhaps—get the block removed if I bothered to ask, but I hate that I even have to do that.) I feel, however, that an entity—company or individual—should have the freedom to do whatever they want to with a network that they paid for. The thing that should make network neutrality a non-issue is the fact that I pay my ISP for the use of their network. If I don’t like the service they provide, I can take my money elsewhere. I have, however, witnessed enough failures of market self-correction to be suspicious of such solutions. Edit: Plus, there’s the fact that I’m working for a company whose products can be used to implement...whatever the opposite of network neutrality is. Network bias?