And let's also take a moment of silence for everyone who invested time and energy into creating stories only for Google to just not be bothered anymore and switch it off.
I have the unfortunate inkling that this is here to stay. In hindsight it seems obvious that Google Search will implement the most successful and ubiquitous features of social media. I don't like it, but the pressure this will create for companies to compete in this space will be huge.
If stories posted here on HN are to be believed, and I overall do believe them, then they are probably mostly still at google, they are just onto a new project. Google seems to prioritize and reward project completion (aka "shipping") more than long-term project successfulness. Also it's more advantageous to do whatever it takes to get a leg up and get promoted than it is to care about the long-term viability of a project.
So to answer your question, probably still at google, just not associated with the "stories" team anymore. It's a game of hot potato where you don't want to be stuck on a team not shipping/innovating since those are the same teams that get spun down (though to be fair it sounds like they just get absorbed onto the "google blob" instead of being let go most of the time).
It's sad that people that are the most passionate are the ones who suffer the most (suffer in terms of not getting funds/time/etc to expand a product they care deeply for and for their troubles get shifted to some other team when Google loses interest in their "baby").
This definitely rings true in my experience, but I have to wonder what a better system would be for Google. Their leadership just isn't top down which means rewards have to hit some kind of decentralised target, launches being the most impactful.
They released a Wordpress plugin a few months ago[0], so this is designed more for content teams and marketers that would prefer to focus on producing stories rather than dealing with developers' objections. Google Tag Manager has the same raison d'etre.
Wow, I guess this is what FOMO looks like when taken to the b2c megacorp level.
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.
An interesting hot take I read a while back (that I can't find) was that Google's strategy is generally "compete with every company on every product in order to build a moat, so that no one can touch search, which is the actual castle." And if you think about it makes a lot of sense -- Google competes with almost every other tech company on something, but no one competes with Google on search. The exception, perhaps, is voice search where Alexa / Siri are truly competitive.
Amazon has been aggressively eating into Google's search advertising market share, which is actually the biggest threat to Google's model today (aside from general obsolescence as activity drifts away from the open web).
I use Bing... sometimes. They literally give you rewards points (that can be redeemed for Microsoft/Xbox gift cards) for searching. Pretty funny, the lengths they go to get you to use Bing...
Interestingly. There's bound to be more people using Bing in the Silicon Valley bubble than outside it. This is because duckduckgo, the famed privacy focused search engine uses Bing as the back end.
And this seems to be about providing Google-only search result content that no competitor could equal since it's literally built on google's tech, RE: "Your story can then be surfaced in relevant Google Search results and Discover."
The non-cynical take is that "stories" is the first content format since the "feed" that is really sticky and opens a new avenue for user interaction. Everyone is adopting them because is now clear that it's not a fad.
Consumers understand the concept of stories and actually engage heavily with them so nobody wants to miss out.
Of course not all the implementations are good or useful, but from a user interaction perspective the functionality is becoming so widely familiar that it makes sense why everyone is adopting this format.
I don't think the fact everyone is adopting them makes it not a fad. People have jumped on a lot of fads over the years. Hell, even animated gifs are losing a lot of popularity now; can you imagine thinking that 10y ago?
More importantly, this is still driven by one or two big players using this format. If those players decide to innovate with the format, it could radically alter how people feel about it and it could lose in popularity, or it could change enough that Google's implementation becomes irrelevant unless they alter it significantly as well (which then gives more work downstream, which could make publishers stop bothering with it if they ever did).
This feels super fragile and tbh looks more like a desperate play from Google than an adoptive one.
In fact, you know what an adoptive one would look like to me? Having google start seriously indexing stories and be able to show them in rich media results.
I think the difference is: one approach is ad driven, one is search driven.
When the discussion thread abounds with people who have no idea what this "stories" concept is about, and none of them seem to care to find out,... that's the first hint that you might want to question some of your assumptions.
> It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it’ll fail just as badly.
It feels a lot more like it is AMP all over again (because it is literally AMP). And I don’t recall that failing.
AMP is the Google thing it is trendy to complain about taking over, as opposed to almost everything else, where it is trendy to complain about it imminently failing.
I'll be honest: I don't know what this is and I don't want to know. I want nothing to do with it. Google needs to give up on this.
They failed with gchat, they failed with google wave, they failed with orkut, they failed with google+.... They can't seem to stop trying to worm their way into social tech.
They just don't get that their brand doesn't work for this and nobody is buying it.
I don't know how to solve Google's problems and I don't pretend to. If I did I'd write a carefully thought-out Medium post and get claps and reshares and so on.
All I know is that as a user I can only describe my emotional reaction as "revulsion" whenever they unveil one of their new cash-grab copies of someone else's platform.
Here's how I view the Google brand in a nutshell: Half-assed crap that will fall out from under me, with bright colors.
That's it. There's more to it, but that's the primary view I have of them. Gmail was good once, then got bloated and slow. Search was good once, but is now Search for Stuff to Buy. All sorts of other things were good once, and now don't exist.
So when you said, "I don't know what this is and I don't want to know", I'm right there with you. I feel like I already know the part that will make me ignore it, so I'm not going to spend another minute on it. (Other than to trash it here, of course :)
Its fine to keep trying, its just that they keep forcing it down your throat by either tying everything to search, or not standing behind a firm commitment of support. As much as I dislike Google, if Google created a non-advertising, non-surveillance paid product that was quality, I'd definitely consider it. Heck I still buy Apple products when they're good, even if I don't like their anti-repair stance.
Anywho, as it stands now, Google seem to be finding new ways to set up toll-booths on the internet via search lock-in. That's their new mantra. Whatever happened to organizing the world's information? Even their "About 2,800,000 results" is total BS. I can't go past page 20 on almost all queries.
Am I the only one who, after reading the landing page, still has no idea what this is? I’ve been watching “immersive” websites for quite some time, mostly marketing-ish websites but also sometimes some special purpose pages from National Geografic or NYT.
What exactly is this? A JavaScript/CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?
I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.
I think they are just trying to make it easy to make a story-like webpage (as you mentioned nat geo or NYT do this at times). However someone with no web experience who just wants to tell a story can't make a complicated site like that.
So, it seems like this is just a tool to assist with that.
Which is interesting.. however their landing page sure doesn't make it at all clear as to what is going on.
The key part is that it’s hosted by google, and can appear on other google surfaces. So pretty soon google will just show this at the top of the search results, instead of directing you to the website.
At least they’re generous enough to give you some ad revenue from it, unlike featured snippets.
> Web Stories are a web-based version of the popular “Stories” format that blend video, audio, images, animation and text to create a dynamic, less formal consumption experience that goes beyond a simple play button. This visual format lets you explore content at your own pace by tapping through it, or swiping from one piece of content to the next.
It looks like a format to let Google put small web pages with mixed media into search carousels.
Hey, that is contrary to our entire newsroom's ethics and policies. It's called a native, uh, something-or-another, and we promise that we stand behind our journalistic integrity.
On an unrelated note, we thank our sponsors and benefactors for bringing us drafts and notes we occasionally might use to augment our impeccable news coverage.
Absolute trash. For most searches these days alternative search engines are proving much more effective to me. Can I just get a simple list of results please??
Based on the description, I think it's like a web page, but you host it yourself, can embed media, link to other web pages, and it can be found using Google.
Tell marketers/SEO experts that stories will be shown prominently on Google search results, and they'll be selling that stuff as "You must have this!" to their clients.
I imagine Google's search results will look like Instagram's Explore tab soon enough (https://icdn6.digitaltrends.com/image/instagram-stories-expl... ) showing "trending" clips which are mostly video snippets stolen and re-posted to carry ads from the re-poster...
So... it's like watching a YouTube video, but every 10 seconds, it jumps back 10 seconds and repeats that 10 seconds, so you have to keep pressing "next [slide]" (at least Instagram/Snapchat progresses seamlessly)
Snapchat and Vine started it, and now TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are all neck-deep in it.
Every single one is dominated by this content in 2020, with perhaps the only area where text is still a main thing being Discord (although voice-chat is the attractive bit for gamers) & the streaming world (Twitch comments, youtube comments, niche Twitter communities).
Whether we like it or not that's where the users are, and for Google that means it's where the ads and indexing should be.
Yikes, I'm so out of touch. It guess it's the modern equivalent of flipping through pictures in a magazine, but I never really understood the entertainment value in that either.
Fwiw, it's the only way to post something on Youtube/Instagram/Facebook/etc. that: doesn't have a like count, has no comments, it's ephemeral, and anyone who responds to it basically is just sending you a private message than writing something everyone can see.
It's much better than posting the content normally and having to feel somewhat like a loser when nobody even likes/comments on it.
On Instagram I have like 6 photos uploaded the normal way. For years I've only used the "stories" system to engage with friends. It's far more personal. Don't knock it too quickly, you may find it's a step in the right direction.
I don't want it at the top of Google search as a marketing apparatus, though.
Discord attracted gamers because they could sync up during games, raids, etc (and on top of that you can advertise it through your status too). Otherwise it's Slack for people who don't want to feel like they're at work, in line with the spirit of the last few generations of gacha games (boost this server by paying, get more emojis for yourself by paying, etc)
I agree that the text is the major activity going on at any given moment because text remains a good asynchronous repository, but if they hadn't basically integrated mumble/teamspeak to slack I'm not sure the glitter would have been enough to stick, because gamers (and some groups of discussions) definitely do rely on those voice lobbies when actually being present.
It’s pretty cool. If you make a url return data that is visually aligned with “a story protocol” google will put it at top of relevant search results.
Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.
Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.
I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.
> Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.
Except that the protocol will be designed not for the benefit of the web in general but rather for Google to maximize its ad revenue.
I'm all for sites doing new and interesting things, but just like AMP I'm wary when these innovations are being driven by a single company that has monopolistic power over website discoverability and profitability.
it's Google one AMPing (heh) Amazon's alexa actions.
You develop content they can shove in their Voice/Phone "AI" Assistants, and they throw some organic search scraps your way.
The end goal of those companies (goog, amz, appl, fb) is to be the new AOL. And the plan is the same as AOL in the 90s: controlling the new browser (the App du jour used to run searchs and scroll mindless content)
They'll rank you higher as well for supporting their initiative but they'll tell you it's because of 'the users' but it's basically pressure on companies to adopt it.
There really should be some kind of federated crawler + search platform. There's no reason why it should be reasonable that a private company (Google) succeeds in attaining its goal of organizing all the world's public information. Unfortunately it's very hard for me to see a revolution in people's choice of search engine..
I know this comes up every time Google/AMP is involved, but .. what's the argument that AMP is anti-competitive? It's and open protocol, you can make your own AMP crawler, content-maker, parser, etc?
I agree that the continued increase of "shiny"-ness of "content" is basically hacking people's attention and it should be drastically clamped down - but still, I don't see the argument for how Google and AMP and the "open web" and competition interact together. What are the relevant consequences and "market forces", whose responsibility is what, etc. Could someone explain it? Thanks!
It's a protocol pushed by one company that wants to bend the web to fit it's purposes. To do that, Google ranks AMP pages more highly. And that's anti competitive and breaks search.
One reason Google wants the whole web to be "standard" is so they can scrape all information more easily, show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic, and create an internet information silo.
Prevalence. Not GP and I don't use Facebook, but for what it's worth I hate recieving Apple News links too. No it's no worse than receiving bit.ly links to articles, but that doesn't happen to me.
I hate this argument, but here it goes: Google is a private company. Do they have a duty to the open web?
A bit more constructively:
Who are the stakeholders here in the "open web"?
> show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic
Agreed. AMP allows ads, so when the users open the site the original site can receive ad revenue. But the snippets Google shows on the search results page likely deprive the original sites from traffic.
However ... it's not like Wikipedia wasn't already "stealing facts".
Completely agree with this sentiment. Dug slightly deeper and founds this. Stories are part of APM, adding the ability to create the 'stories' pages by conforming to Google's format like including a link to their stories JavaScript.
Basically mobile-first tappable web pages. Design-wise it's distinct from most web links as they require you to scroll to read. Here you just tap through pages, like you would on an ebook.
I clicked the learn section after, like what you said, learning nothing from the landing page.
After reading through the learn section, it looks like a clone of facebook or instagram's story feature or whatever that will appear on google search results.
At least from the info they've provided.
I've always disliked those...it's the one thing on facebook that shows the other person who looks at it at when. Something I've always been secretly terrified facebook does with everything.
At first I thought it was a feature for webmasters to add “stories” or “cards” within the search results. Then I guessed it is a web publishing platform. No idea yet!
This is one of the more humorous threads I've read in awhile. Instagram stories are among the most widely used social media features, and it seems like the majority of commenters here are completely unfamiliar with the format.
The cognitive dissonance is from Stories being marketed as innovation. HN users are aware of stories (Snapchat has had them since 2013), but since they're not innovative in any way shape or form people aren't making the connection.
People know what stories are, they make sense on Instagram or other similar platforms, but I have absolutely no clue why everyone needs to make stories now. Linkedin? Youtube? Netflix? And now Google with stories in search? What do they bring in all these cases?
I know what stories are on the other apps... I don't know what this is: it sort of looks like it might be a library I can put on my website to make something that looks like stories, but it also sounds like it is on Google's website? Some people are saying it isn't on the website but is actually on the new tab page of Chrome? I'm seeing people say it involves AMP somehow?
Google should have 1) showed the context in which these show up and then 2) showed a snippet of code or metadata or whatever it was that made it work for some particular site, and then I feel like I would have gotten it; instead they threw up some marketing site that fails to answer even basic questions about what they are doing :/.
It feels like instagram/facebook-like stories, but searchable on the web. These interactive stories definitely work great as advertisements on Facebook and now Google wants to monetize from them too.
This is literally AMP [1]. The feature was launched as AMP Stories, which has now been rebranded to Web Stories. They are throwing everything at the wall to increase the use of AMP.
Riding those "Web" coattails real hard on this one, if I do say so. Seems quite confusing.
Facebook, to competes, rebrands as "Web Social Network". The technicians can slice hairs over who deserves it or no, but the distinction would be faint, in comparing similar name-grabbing exercises. Ok, Google, maybe you deserve it a little tiny bit more, maybe a smidge, but hardly.
This seems to be more focused on the distribution. The screenshot makes it seem like it'll be shown on Chrome's new tab page. So in some sense it is closer to Snapchat stories. It's basically stories in Chrome?
> This seems to be more focused on the distribution. The screenshot makes it seem like it'll be shown on Chrome's new tab page.
Yes, the point of AMP is for Google to control content distribution on the web, and they entice you to give up control over your content by offering you exposure, for now, just like they did with the Top Stories carousel in Google Search.
The irony of Top Stories is that it forced publishers to use AMP in order to regain the search results placement they already had, before Google took it away by pushing down search results to make room for the new carousel that featured AMP pages.
How are you "giving up control"? Having stuffed published in literally any sort of journal, newspaper or anything has certain formatting and layout requirements. Just because you format it in the "stories" layout doesn't mean you're giving up control over your content.
AMP also still properly directs both ads and analytics metrics, and in some cases can be hosted on caches you own, but even if not, having it hosted in a different cache is also not giving up control.
At no point in this process are you losing control of your content. If you don't want to participate, then don't. Creators decide to put their content on TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and now this is yet another avenue they can put their contents on. How is it any different?
That should cover basically every user, but it's also open source so you can contribute any you think is missing.
Also, how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok? The latter didn't even have an creator program until very recently, so you were literally posting your content for free.
> You make it sound like it's a very limited list... 80 analytics vendors
80 out of thousands of analytics platforms and custom analytics scripts is a very limited list.
> how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok?
But that's the thing with AMP, I still would expect content to be served as it was on my site, it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
Do you have a source on that? Also what % of websites use an analytic provider not included in those 80? I don't have a source either but my personal experience says it'snegligibly small, probably below 0.1%.
> it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
Google is pushing these stories to their users on the discovery feed, so it actually is all about getting an audience from AMP. Yes, it is still being served from your own site, and while there are some limitation, you still have orders of magnitude more control over the content that you would on literally any other platform.
I think they are taking Snap's stories and atomizing it so that they can be placed anywhere on the web. Then they are monetizing it by putting ads over it.
Stories are popular because they can be quickly viewed. I don't know anyone in real life who has the attention span to read anything more than a 500 words article without graphics in it everywhere.
Looks interesting, seems like an AMP like format (or AMP extension? Unclear.) for publishing stories that can be picked up by other platforms (likely at this point only google). I realize people hate AMP, but this seems like a strictly better alternative than a closed platform like snapchat, instagram, etc., present.
I have no doubt pretty soon these stories will be in a carousel at the top of google.com search results, just like featured snippets. And like AMP, this will bring you higher in the search results, so everyone will be making these.
Another way to keep people on Google instead instead of proceeding to the host website...
(It looks like they already do this in their mobile app)
I think the comments about how this is yet another google wave/orkut/+, etc., are kind of missing what this is (probably because of bad branding overlap with Snapchat/Instagram stories).
I think this is a content marketing and blogging platform for small startups, "influencers", and the like. Think of NomadList, Thrillist, food review websites, blogs, etc.
That doesn't mean that this will be very successful, obviously, but I don't see an individual person making much use of this. Seems like a fine thing for a startup to do, Google will probably not get enough out of this to keep it alive.
I'm actually planning to use this to create a web version of the music zines I post on Instagram. I used to create them using the Swiper slider library, but you have to build the entire HTML+CSS structure yourself, which is very time consuming. Something GUI-based and mobile-specific will greatly increase the speed of production.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadMaybe something like emacs, but AMP-based, and we'll have the worst of two worlds!
So to answer your question, probably still at google, just not associated with the "stories" team anymore. It's a game of hot potato where you don't want to be stuck on a team not shipping/innovating since those are the same teams that get spun down (though to be fair it sounds like they just get absorbed onto the "google blob" instead of being let go most of the time).
It's sad that people that are the most passionate are the ones who suffer the most (suffer in terms of not getting funds/time/etc to expand a product they care deeply for and for their troubles get shifted to some other team when Google loses interest in their "baby").
[0]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/web-stories/
Google: Stories are cool now, no?
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.
https://account.microsoft.com/rewards/
> Yahoo! Search is a rebadged version of the Bing search engine owned by Yahoo!, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
You might be surprised what Joe Average uses. I run into people who not only still use MapQuest, but use it as a verb.
Of course not all the implementations are good or useful, but from a user interaction perspective the functionality is becoming so widely familiar that it makes sense why everyone is adopting this format.
More importantly, this is still driven by one or two big players using this format. If those players decide to innovate with the format, it could radically alter how people feel about it and it could lose in popularity, or it could change enough that Google's implementation becomes irrelevant unless they alter it significantly as well (which then gives more work downstream, which could make publishers stop bothering with it if they ever did).
This feels super fragile and tbh looks more like a desperate play from Google than an adoptive one.
In fact, you know what an adoptive one would look like to me? Having google start seriously indexing stories and be able to show them in rich media results.
I think the difference is: one approach is ad driven, one is search driven.
It feels a lot more like it is AMP all over again (because it is literally AMP). And I don’t recall that failing.
AMP is the Google thing it is trendy to complain about taking over, as opposed to almost everything else, where it is trendy to complain about it imminently failing.
They failed with gchat, they failed with google wave, they failed with orkut, they failed with google+.... They can't seem to stop trying to worm their way into social tech.
They just don't get that their brand doesn't work for this and nobody is buying it.
All I know is that as a user I can only describe my emotional reaction as "revulsion" whenever they unveil one of their new cash-grab copies of someone else's platform.
That's it. There's more to it, but that's the primary view I have of them. Gmail was good once, then got bloated and slow. Search was good once, but is now Search for Stuff to Buy. All sorts of other things were good once, and now don't exist.
So when you said, "I don't know what this is and I don't want to know", I'm right there with you. I feel like I already know the part that will make me ignore it, so I'm not going to spend another minute on it. (Other than to trash it here, of course :)
Anywho, as it stands now, Google seem to be finding new ways to set up toll-booths on the internet via search lock-in. That's their new mantra. Whatever happened to organizing the world's information? Even their "About 2,800,000 results" is total BS. I can't go past page 20 on almost all queries.
What exactly is this? A JavaScript/CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?
I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.
So, it seems like this is just a tool to assist with that.
Which is interesting.. however their landing page sure doesn't make it at all clear as to what is going on.
At least they’re generous enough to give you some ad revenue from it, unlike featured snippets.
> Web Stories are a web-based version of the popular “Stories” format that blend video, audio, images, animation and text to create a dynamic, less formal consumption experience that goes beyond a simple play button. This visual format lets you explore content at your own pace by tapping through it, or swiping from one piece of content to the next.
It looks like a format to let Google put small web pages with mixed media into search carousels.
The web is turning into Entertainment Tonight, the show my mom used to watch. Ads disguised as content.
Sure feels like the final evolution of ads will be indistinguishable from content.
On an unrelated note, we thank our sponsors and benefactors for bringing us drafts and notes we occasionally might use to augment our impeccable news coverage.
Wait five years. It will not be there.
It seems like a framework for creating short vertical-orientated chaptered videos with fancy captions and that play mute by default.
Why anyone would want this? I do not know.
https://stories.google/showcase/
I would imagine some portion of the 1 billion Instagram users that are familiar with this style of storytelling.
its product manager at Google, looking for a promotion (and then let it rot)
I imagine Google's search results will look like Instagram's Explore tab soon enough (https://icdn6.digitaltrends.com/image/instagram-stories-expl... ) showing "trending" clips which are mostly video snippets stolen and re-posted to carry ads from the re-poster...
So... it's like watching a YouTube video, but every 10 seconds, it jumps back 10 seconds and repeats that 10 seconds, so you have to keep pressing "next [slide]" (at least Instagram/Snapchat progresses seamlessly)
God fucking damnit, people...
Snapchat and Vine started it, and now TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are all neck-deep in it. Every single one is dominated by this content in 2020, with perhaps the only area where text is still a main thing being Discord (although voice-chat is the attractive bit for gamers) & the streaming world (Twitch comments, youtube comments, niche Twitter communities).
Whether we like it or not that's where the users are, and for Google that means it's where the ads and indexing should be.
It's much better than posting the content normally and having to feel somewhat like a loser when nobody even likes/comments on it.
On Instagram I have like 6 photos uploaded the normal way. For years I've only used the "stories" system to engage with friends. It's far more personal. Don't knock it too quickly, you may find it's a step in the right direction.
I don't want it at the top of Google search as a marketing apparatus, though.
Join any big Discord gaming group and I guarantee you'll see more people chatting via text than using the audio functionality.
I agree that the text is the major activity going on at any given moment because text remains a good asynchronous repository, but if they hadn't basically integrated mumble/teamspeak to slack I'm not sure the glitter would have been enough to stick, because gamers (and some groups of discussions) definitely do rely on those voice lobbies when actually being present.
Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.
Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.
I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.
Except that the protocol will be designed not for the benefit of the web in general but rather for Google to maximize its ad revenue.
I'm all for sites doing new and interesting things, but just like AMP I'm wary when these innovations are being driven by a single company that has monopolistic power over website discoverability and profitability.
Seems like it would be a magnet for low-value SEO content and outright scams.
The quote you see at first is: "Stories meet their widest audience ever."
Given that the widest audience is anyone who wants to search for something, this seems like a massive anti-trust bait.
Also, hard-pass on the continual dumbing down of content to contribute to the phenomenal attention deficit modern social media has introduced.
it's Google one AMPing (heh) Amazon's alexa actions.
You develop content they can shove in their Voice/Phone "AI" Assistants, and they throw some organic search scraps your way.
The end goal of those companies (goog, amz, appl, fb) is to be the new AOL. And the plan is the same as AOL in the 90s: controlling the new browser (the App du jour used to run searchs and scroll mindless content)
I agree that the continued increase of "shiny"-ness of "content" is basically hacking people's attention and it should be drastically clamped down - but still, I don't see the argument for how Google and AMP and the "open web" and competition interact together. What are the relevant consequences and "market forces", whose responsibility is what, etc. Could someone explain it? Thanks!
One reason Google wants the whole web to be "standard" is so they can scrape all information more easily, show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic, and create an internet information silo.
A bit more constructively: Who are the stakeholders here in the "open web"?
> show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic
Agreed. AMP allows ads, so when the users open the site the original site can receive ad revenue. But the snippets Google shows on the search results page likely deprive the original sites from traffic.
However ... it's not like Wikipedia wasn't already "stealing facts".
That's the point, isn't it?
er, isn't it explicitly tied to google?
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
Basically mobile-first tappable web pages. Design-wise it's distinct from most web links as they require you to scroll to read. Here you just tap through pages, like you would on an ebook.
After reading through the learn section, it looks like a clone of facebook or instagram's story feature or whatever that will appear on google search results.
At least from the info they've provided.
I've always disliked those...it's the one thing on facebook that shows the other person who looks at it at when. Something I've always been secretly terrified facebook does with everything.
Which Zuck blatantly copied from Snapchat.
Google's version should be called Gnapchat...
And what do we think? Google Graveyard by 2022, or later?
I came here to read comments about more details.
I would be guilty of this. I don't use social media, so this is new to me. It is difficult to see the appeal at first glance.
Google should have 1) showed the context in which these show up and then 2) showed a snippet of code or metadata or whatever it was that made it work for some particular site, and then I feel like I would have gotten it; instead they threw up some marketing site that fails to answer even basic questions about what they are doing :/.
“Like AMP”? Well, if you follow the links to get to the dev docs, you land at:
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
So, yeah, it is very much like AMP.
https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/amp-stories-bringi...
We get it, you figured out how to do clever CSS animations tied to scroll position. Thanks, I hate it.
I’ve tried 3 times and I can’t manage to stay on the page for more than a few seconds without getting frustrated and closing the tab.
This is literally AMP [1]. The feature was launched as AMP Stories, which has now been rebranded to Web Stories. They are throwing everything at the wall to increase the use of AMP.
[1] https://amp.dev/about/stories/
Facebook, to competes, rebrands as "Web Social Network". The technicians can slice hairs over who deserves it or no, but the distinction would be faint, in comparing similar name-grabbing exercises. Ok, Google, maybe you deserve it a little tiny bit more, maybe a smidge, but hardly.
Yes, the point of AMP is for Google to control content distribution on the web, and they entice you to give up control over your content by offering you exposure, for now, just like they did with the Top Stories carousel in Google Search.
The irony of Top Stories is that it forced publishers to use AMP in order to regain the search results placement they already had, before Google took it away by pushing down search results to make room for the new carousel that featured AMP pages.
AMP also still properly directs both ads and analytics metrics, and in some cases can be hosted on caches you own, but even if not, having it hosted in a different cache is also not giving up control.
At no point in this process are you losing control of your content. If you don't want to participate, then don't. Creators decide to put their content on TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and now this is yet another avenue they can put their contents on. How is it any different?
Only if the ads and analytics are AMP supported and in the list of AMP approved vendors I think, for example: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...
[0] https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/
That should cover basically every user, but it's also open source so you can contribute any you think is missing.
Also, how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok? The latter didn't even have an creator program until very recently, so you were literally posting your content for free.
80 out of thousands of analytics platforms and custom analytics scripts is a very limited list.
> how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok?
But that's the thing with AMP, I still would expect content to be served as it was on my site, it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
Do you have a source on that? Also what % of websites use an analytic provider not included in those 80? I don't have a source either but my personal experience says it'snegligibly small, probably below 0.1%.
> it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
But I think it actually is. Look at this front page screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/HEjjXqm.png
Google is pushing these stories to their users on the discovery feed, so it actually is all about getting an audience from AMP. Yes, it is still being served from your own site, and while there are some limitation, you still have orders of magnitude more control over the content that you would on literally any other platform.
Another "social" attempt from Google.
Anyone remember Google+?
That's what popped in my mind when the title ("Stories meet their widest audience ever").
This is a natural extension of web.
Edit: here's the technical documentation, https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
Social is Google's Moby Dick haha. You'll get it one day big G.
+ This last one's a bet. I'll check back next year
(It looks like they already do this in their mobile app)
I think this is a content marketing and blogging platform for small startups, "influencers", and the like. Think of NomadList, Thrillist, food review websites, blogs, etc.
That doesn't mean that this will be very successful, obviously, but I don't see an individual person making much use of this. Seems like a fine thing for a startup to do, Google will probably not get enough out of this to keep it alive.