Amsterdam, Netherlands, February 13, 2018 — Email is getting a 21st-century makeover thanks to Google. The company is using the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) protocol for Google Mail to jazz things up. On the plus side, an email that’s up to date with current information is a good thing. It could save the sending of a constant stream of new emails and benefit from web content linked directly into the mail. Check out Google’s developer post here.
On the negative side, email – now some 45 years old – is one of the less annoying ways of digital communication. That’s if you have good spam filters, lots of folders and are good at pruning unwanted newsletters. Email is solid and reliable and not shoving constant message or update reminders in our faces.
We’d imagine that these new emails will be more annoying and demanding of our attention as they update, and Google’s apps keep banging on about them.
You’ve got talkative mail
On the positive side, this combination could mean no more going to a web page, swapping from your email app to the browser to sign up for something of interest. Currently in test, the feature should be rolled out later this year. And you can bet Apple and Microsoft will respond with something similar.
There’s also the risk that people see one thing in an email and want to share it, but others can’t view it, or the deal has changed by the time they view it. That could quickly lead to chaos and if spammers or criminals find a weakness could see users signing up for all sorts of things.
AMP is an open-source, mobile-first, project, introduced a couple of years ago. Google fancies spreading the idea around, it can already be integrated into Wix sites and WordPress pages, but going to email could open it up to a whole new world.
There’s an AMP conference taking place now, in the Netherlands. There’s a host of explainer videos out now to help ramp up awareness with Google taking the stage at the keynote to announce the email integration.
YouTube: Keynote (AMP Conf 2018)
Photo credit: Google
Source: Rudy Galfi (Google Developers Blog) / Dave Besbris, Malte Ubl, Lisa Wang, Aakash Sahney (AMP Conference keynote video)
