1. For me, it’s not so much the email itself as the frequency with which it comes. If I’m doing business with a company, I may actually want to hear about specials they have or certain announcements they want to make. I do not, however, want to hear from them every week (or, God forbid, every day). If companies like Amazon and ProFlowers sent emails twice or three times a year, I’d love it, and I might actually read the email.

2. Yeah, I’m also not a fan of truncated feeds, but I still prefer them to nothing. For me, the feed serves two purposes: to let me know there has been an update, and to let me read the update. I’d love to have both, but even just knowing there is an update is better than my having to go back and visit each site every day to see if there is one.

3. Yes, ads have been abused. I keep the ads on my site at the very bottom. Not very great for bringing in the big bucks, but it shows a little respect for my visitors. I still get enough revenue to pay server costs, so it’s all good. Right now I’m using NoScript to block annoying Flash-based ads, but regular banners or text-based ads I still leave alone. I know people still need to fund their websites.

4. We got the voicemail as email attachment thing at work, and it is sweet! Still, I’m annoyed more by having to listen to the message than having to navigate the menus. Oftentimes what people say in a two-minute voicemail could have easily been sent an email that would have taken me ten seconds to scan and get the gist of.

Phones are for friendly catch-up time with friends or sensitive professional conversations that need discussion. Everything else should be done by email, if not in person.

Furthermore those (anti)social services live in their own data island. I cannot install the Facebook/Twitter/Identica application on my server and be part of the network. That’s not how the Internet (nor the Web) is supposed to work.

The biggest issue I take is with ads and truncated content. If your RSS feed is for a “planet” style site where content is basically a blog post, I can see your point. However, for something like a news site or anything else where people are being paid to post content, who are you to say that it’s unacceptable. You’re asking people to give away information for free without ad support. You don’t want to go to their site? Well why should they put up content for you? It’s like you mentioned, LWN you pay for so you’re OK with the shortened content. A news site is getting paid with ad-clicks so what’s the difference. If anything, it’s better for the consumer because you don’t have to pay anything, it’s ad supported. If you don’t like the ads, AdBlock and be done with it but don’t criticize the business plan because it’s inconvenient for you.

* Identica is a microblogging platform that uses the Open Microblogging Protocol, and can be federated.
* Jabber uses XMPP, another open and federated protocol.
* IRC is also another open and federated standard.

All 3 of the above, I can use with proven clients, which can also provide logs for offline access. Facebook being the only exception.

As for ads on websites, I have to totally agree. They are getting way out of control.

I haven’t checked my voicemail in years. Send sound files to my gmail or something by all means, but I’m too lazy to use the system Verizon uses now.

* truncated RSS–feeds that include all the content are definitely better. I killed subscriptions to truncated feeds with comic strips–that is definitely useless. Otherwise, truncated ones are not so bad. I can scan the headline and summary, and typically I read only a fraction of the posts.

* ads – Adblock Plus. Done.

* voicemail – I used to have Sprint wireless and it didn’t make you enter your code to get voicemail if you were calling from your phone. I thought this was standard. Then I switched to Verizon, which makes you put your code in every time. That is annoying–as if I am worried about someone stealing my voicemail messages if they are calling from my phone. That said, I have seen other people complain about voicemail. I don’t think it is so bad. Why do you leave voicemails in the queue? Just delete them after listening to them. And I definitely do not call numbers back if I do not recognize them. “Hello, I have no idea who you are, but you called me”? VM can be great, and because it takes more effort for somebody to leave one, I pay more attention to them than I do to emails. Again, I guess this makes me a fogey.

But you definitely have the right to be annoyed by all these things I just don’t find them as annoying.

These are closed networks that you have no control over and where you have no chance of storing and/or migrating your communication. They are very much against standards as their business model and you will be using different networks and services in several years (or even months) probably.

All of these are compelling, legit gripes, but the voicemail one bugs more more than anything else. My parents and siblings, despite conversations about this topic and the message I had on my old phone that said “Please don’t leave a voice message” and listed some reasons, suggested other means of contacting me, etc, nonetheless left long, rambling messages. Friends and strangers did, too, but on that front I could at least rationalize that they might have thought I was kidding / overstating / etc.

On my new phone, I never set up a voice mailbox; I thought that this would leave me with a generic “You have reached number XXXXXXXXXX, please leave a message.” No — it just says that this voice message box is not set up!

Victory.

An annoying victory, to be sure, because even with my distaste for it, I know sometimes voice messages are useful, and I may end up caving. But it’s been several months now of very few regrets on this front.

The best thing, IMO, would be if vox messages were either a) automatically sent to email as MP3 (or other encoding) files and / or b) transferred TO THE PHONE, and made visually accessible on the handset, with relevant items displayed (name of caller, length of message, etc), with instant zapping, ffwd’ing, etc. Using the phone as an awful remote control for an audio-based interface is just plain brain-dead design. Would I take it over having no phone, or being a caveman, or a sharp poke in the eye? Sure. But that’s not a good defense.

I’d also like to give friends a password / passcode that would be necessary to leave a message, so getting a message would mean it was from someone who was authorized to contact you by this overall annoying method.

Cheers,

timothy