Category: Internet (Page 1 of 40)

The end of POP3 in Gmail

November 30, 2025 /

I have owned netwert.com since 1997. That’s a long time! I have a few dozen email aliases that route through this domain, for everything from work to shopping to family management.

I have had Gmail since shortly after it went public in 2004. That’s also a long time! Gmail is my default mail interface. I am completely acclimated to its approach and appreciate the robustness of its search features.

For as long as I can remember, I have had Gmail configured to check netwert.com emails as well as my gmail inbox, using an old internet protocol called POP3. This has made life very easy. Gmail even lets me toggle between addresses when composing, so I can email you from either my Gmail or my netwert email. I have my User Savvy email running through there, too. So easy! So useful! My consolidated inbox is 15GB of pure digital simplification.

At least, it was. Google quietly announced in October that they are shutting down POP3 access to external accounts, effective January 1. They emailed some users about it, although they didn’t email me. I read in a secondary source that this is being done for email security purposes, although I didn’t hear that from Google. Notably, they didn’t provide any alternatives, just a Google Reader-style ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and what is now a one-month deadline to do something about it. (They do still support IMAP, but I have concerns about consistent performance.)

This is, for me, very bad. Email is email, of course, and I can find a new tool for consolidating my inboxes. But I liked and stuck with Gmail for its relative permanency and best-in-breed user experience. Now I’m going to have to find a new solution—and I will probably wind up with two, because accessing Gmail from a non-Google solution is going to be undeniably worse than Gmail itself.

I’ve done a good job for many years with my digital continuity. I suppose I should be neither surprised nor disappointed that Google made a decision that’s not in the best interests of a geeky edge case. But I am, and I am.

Suggestions on better email solutions welcome. Maybe hit me up at my netwert email and not Gmail this time around.

Typepad

September 3, 2025 /

The news that Typepad is shutting down raised some eyebrows in my corner of the internet. Typepad was a bit of a niche service, but it was an interesting attempt at both democratizing and monetizing blogging. While it’s sad that it’s going away—I am anti-linkrot, and “your account will be permanently deactivated” is quite hostile to web permanency—it’s also interesting to me that it hung on this long.

With a little digging I found my own Typepad blog (I knew I had to have tried it out) at ideapad.typepad.com. I made two posts in the mid-2000s, eighteen months apart, both quick hits and promptly forgotten. Not really worth shoving that into the Wayback Machine, but here’s a screenshot for posterity.

The impossibility of comprehending AI

August 4, 2025 /

There’s an interesting conversation occurring around conversational AI, and the thought that humans, as a species, aren’t properly equipped to handle their existence. Consider these perspectives when next reading about blind trust in Gemini search results, or people using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Rusty Foster:

Humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it. In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for “intelligence.” … Very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought.

Philip Bump:

Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. …
Remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.

Look at it what it takes for Michael Lopp, one of the best communicators and smartest thinkers on tech topics, to explain how he works with AI. I grabbed a representative sentence, but at least skim the whole thing:

The number of “decisions” the robot made to design the page wildly exceeded the number of requirements I specified. … Like everything a robot generates, the burden is on you, the human, to confirm that what it generates is sound.

So: we have these tools, and we can embrace their potential and harness their output, but entire mental disciplines must be created to engage with them at an appropriate level, while the tools are simultaneously evolving more rapidly than perhaps any invention in history.

I personally don’t know where this is taking us as a society, but I’m thinking about it a lot.

Interview

June 27, 2025 /

I was delighted to be contacted by Manuel Moreale for his long-running People and Blogs interview series, which went live today. If you didn’t come here from there, here’s our conversation. The archives are full of interesting people and worth poking through. Thanks, Manuel!

Straplines

August 27, 2024 /

Making good things great. Digital innovation, product strategy, coaching. Family man and Yankees fan. I like minor chords and chocolate mint.

It’s been a year-plus since I’ve posted on Twitter, and today I updated my bio to just send people to my Threads account.

Because I’m @netwert on Threads (a username I really don’t like anymore, cf. this web domain, but what can you do) my bio there simply says, “I should be werty.”

I rather liked my long-time Twitter bio, though, so I saved it and am posting it here for posterity.

These things are by their nature ephemeral, of course. My Twitter bio occasionally also housed pithy commentary, including, “Ask me about my new front teeth,” and, “Charter member of the DJ LeMahieu Fan Club.” Alas, just as with LeMahieu’s batting prowess, that era has come to an end.

An incomplete list of things younger than the comp sub that gave me full access to wsj.com until its cancellation today after 24 years

July 15, 2024 /

3G cell phone service
the George W. Bush presidency
Carlos Alcaraz
Verizon
iPod
Beyonce’s solo career
Fall Out Boy
Olivia Rodrigo
9/11
Myspace
Blu-Ray
the AOL-Time Warner merger
Fandango
“Gilmore Girls”
“Monsters Inc.”
USB flash drives
Montenegro
Chrysler’s PT Cruiser
Real Simple magazine
The South Beach Diet
Mile High Stadium
West Elm
Spanx
The entire 21st century

Thank you, Joy, wherever you are.

Great blog posts

June 11, 2024 /

The Story of Etak, on Map Happenings.

Now that is a great blog post. Unexpected subject matter, in-depth research, surprising twists, a deep yearning to share it. Cross-posting it on my own blog is the right thing to do.

In this post-peak social media era, it’s gratifying to see the gradual re-emergence of blogs, and of newsletters, which I’ve taken to importing into Feedly and treating the same way. (Because really, a newsletter like Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends is really just blogging with a different delivery mechanism. In an RSS reader, they all feel the same.)

I’ve been trying to add new blogs to my circuit in recent months, while also rediscovering some old-timers who do it well. Caitlin Dewey, as mentioned above, obviously. Ironic Sans is even better now than it was in its earlier incarnation. Halfman has been a wry delight. I declared RSS Zero this morning, but I’ll try to revisit this topic with more suggestions… perhaps even a blogroll.

My default apps

November 8, 2023 /

A blog meme! I recently discovered that early blogger Chris O’Donnell is still at it, and now we’re reading each other again, and he pulled together this list (which I’m guessing started on yet another blog) so I thought I’d join in the fun.

My phone, remember, is an iPhone 13 mini.

Mail Service: whatever Pair is using, and Gmail
Mail Client: Mail app (iPhone), Gmail in the browser (desktop)
Notes: Notes app and/or BBEdit, depending on circumstance
To-Do: Due
Calendar: Calendar app (iPhone), Google Calendar in the browser (desktop)
Contacts: Contacts app (iPhone)
RSS Service: n/a
RSS Client: Feedly
Launcher: N/A
Cloud storage: both Dropbox and iCloud
Photo library: all local, baby, 33,000 images and videos clogging my laptop hard drive
Web Browser: both Chrome and Safari
Chat: Messages and WhatsApp
Bookmarks: Chrome
Reading: Magazines, the New York Times and the internet
Word Processing: Word, usually
Spreadsheets: Excel and Google Sheets, depending
Presentations: PowerPoint, mostly
Shopping Lists: Pen and paper
Personal Finance: a mishmosh
Music: iTunes, streaming subscription + local files
Podcasts: Podcasts app
Password Management: Chrome, despite buying a 1Password subscription
Social Media: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Slack
Weather: Weather app (iPhone) and NOAA Weather (desktop)
Search: DuckDuckGo (iPhone) and Google (desktop)
Code Editor: BBEdit

“One of the world’s oldest continually publishing blogs”

November 1, 2023 /

I have had this self-congratulatory fact in the Ideapad sidebar for some time now. On November 1, 1998, I started the Ideapad. So this marks a full quarter-century of posting my thoughts online.

When I began blogging, the community was small enough that Brigitte Eaton was able to hand-compile a list of all of them. I remember there being 500 or so when I first came across it; the farthest we can see in the Wayback machine shows 1285 weblogs, including this one. The web has come a long, long way since then, and while innumerable blogs have come and gone, the Ideapad endures.

I’m not a real milestone guy, and I covered this lightly when the blog turned twenty, but I do want to acknowledge the moment.

When I reflect on what twenty-five years of blogging means, mostly it’s the persistence: my blog is still here, still publishing new content, at the same URL as when it was launched, and with almost all of the archives intact and readable. It’s not hard to do, but few do it, and when I’m blogging I’m continuing my commitment to digital longevity.

I revisited the bookmarks file referenced in 2018 to see who is still blogging, and oh, the linkrot. Let’s pause to appreciate those who keep at it. Jason Kottke, who inspired me to put up my own weblog, blogs for a living, of course. Peter Merholz, coiner of “blog,” is, blessedly, still maintaining his. Journal-bloggers like Jessamyn and Cat are still journaling away. A tip of the cap also goes to those who stopped blogging but keep their sites live, so their contributions to the formative era of the internet aren’t forgotten. I hope some of these folks see this, and I hope they realize the value of their efforts.

And to you, dear reader: I’ve long stopped looking at my site metrics, and for all I know, my only regulars are me and my mom. (Hi, Mom.) But I’m glad you stopped by, even this once, and I hope you enjoy exploring everything I’ve shared with the world these past 25 years.

Counterpoint: Music has become a ‘just-in-time’ economy. Good

October 16, 2023 /

Over on Music Industry Blog, Mark Mulligan argues that today’s streaming platforms have created a just-in-time economy for popular music, with algorithms pushing artists and labels to release a song once a month to maintain relevancy.

Mulligan’s thesis is that this is bad for creators, and in turn the industry, and it’s going to hurt musicians who need to crank out songs and feed the beast.

I have a countervailing opinion to this, which is that while Mark may be right, the shift is also fantastic—for fans.

The phenomenon of musical acts taking years to craft an album is not consistent through the history of recorded music. Indeed, it only dates back to 1983, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was such a phenomenon that Epic released seven of its nine tracks as singles, drastically extending the active shelf life of the most popular album in Top 40 history.

Before that, albums were thought to have a six- or eight-month sell window in record stores. So artists made a lot more music. Pick any artist from before the disco era and the volume is amazing.

Jimi Hendrix released four albums of new music in the three short years he was a solo artist.
Kiss famously recorded eight albums (including two live double LPs) in less than four years; when Pearl Jam followed up “Vs.” with “Vitalogy” after a little more than a year in the ’90s, the band went on record as saying they wished they could keep up Kiss’s pace.
The Supremes released or appeared on so many albums from 1965 to 1970 that my web browser choked on the Allmusic page.
Even Steely Dan, who were famous for their perfectionism in the studio, put out an album a year from 1972 to 1977.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers taking four years to perfect an album is not a “normal” music routine. It is the result of record labels manipulating album release cycles to maximize the return on investment of expensive studio recordings. The Chili Peppers are proof: their fourth album came out just five years after their debut, and after they got popular and major-label marketing kicked in, it took another thirteen years for the next four to come out.

Now the pendulum has swung the other way, with release cycles condensing for the same reason they expanded—maximize ROI, this time of the artist’s visibility—and artists adapting accordingly. And as a music listener, this is great news.

Most fans will be thrilled to hear a new song from their favorite artists every month or so. This harks all the way back to the 1960s, when people couldn’t get enough of the Beatles, and they locked up the top five slots of the pop chart (and twelve of the Hot 100) at the same time. Perhaps things will get further contorted, and we’ll go back to the pre-rock era, when an artist’s albums were often compilations of songs people already largely knew. This may further antiquate the concept of an album as a cohesive artistic statement, but then, MP3s started that process decades ago.

So yeah, maybe the Spotify effect is changing music release cycles, the same way it’s shortening song lengths. But hey, bring it on! More music sooner is a good thing.