
Google’s AMP Poised to Take the Lead from Facebook’s and Apple’s Walled Gardens - webdisrupt
http://www.mondaynote.com/2016/01/18/googles-amp-poised-to-take-the-lead-from-facebooks-and-apples-walled-gardens/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UK%20Daily%202016-01-19&utm_term=Digiday%20UK%20Newsletter
======
x1024
(The article said to "try any page from The Guardian with '/amp' to test its
performance")

Oh my:
[http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bniZiH/https://www.theguardi...](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bniZiH/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/bacha-
khan-university-explosions-heard-as-gunmen-attack-pakistan/amp)

"Such mobile performance, wow". 4 megabytes of video(Preloading two different
videos. Why?), maybe 10 different domains, downloading JS before downloading
images...

And this is the _showcase_ for AMP.

It's almost as if "there is no silver bullet" for web performance, and "actual
programming skill" is still a requirement.

There is a difference between AMP and non-AMP, yes:
[http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bAnV7C/https://www.theguardi...](http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bAnV7C/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/bacha-
khan-university-explosions-heard-as-gunmen-attack-pakistan)

But at this point in time, it seems that installing an ad blocker has about
the same impact as "conceding to view a crippled AMP-redesign of the page that
doesn't even have navigation".

~~~
wanda
Using the same tool, I can see that my website loads in 440ms in the
Netherlands. The homepage is 140kb, makes 6 requests, leverages caching and
http/2 thanks to nginx etc.

Which is great and everything, but for a reader in Texas, that becomes 1.2s
thanks to the fact that my site is hosted in London.

As you point out, AMP pages which weigh in at 4MB can be loaded in a seemingly
underwhelming time: ~800ms. However, I think the important takeaway from this
is that the pages load in ~800ms in two different continents.

The articles I publish on my blog use AMP-HTML. I don't include media or ads
at all, just text and fonts. These pages fully load in 200ms.

I conclude that the free CDN offered by Google is, frankly, a very attractive
feature.

~~~
r1ch
You can always put Cloudflare in front of a site to get the same CDN benefit.

~~~
cromwellian
How do you know Cloudflare or other CDNs are participating with advertisers
somehow, or responding to government tracking requests?

If the government can subpoena data from Google, are we sure they're not doing
the same or more with CDNs, which don't seem as transparent as the consumer-
facing companies.

~~~
tomjen3
Cloudfare publishes a transparency report
[https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/](https://www.cloudflare.com/transparency/),
whether you trust it is another thing. Personally I have given up on privacy
and now just hope that it can be made so that we are all equally naked.

------
franze
ok, just to get this straight

if a publisher want to do everything right in todays internet, they need

    
    
      * a responsive website
      * with views for desktop, mobile and tablet 
      * optimized for search, social and conversion
      * optional: augmented with schema.org
      * an iphone app (one or more)
      * an android app
      * optional: tablet/ipad app 
      * facebook channel 
      * twitter channel 
      * youtube channel
      * pinterest presence 
      * whatsapp presence
      * snapchat presence 
      * one or more newsletter
      * constant A/B testing
    

now add

    
    
      * facebook instant articles
      * google amp pages
    

did i forget something?

yes page bloat, third party crap and webperformance is a serious issue for
users and publishers, but solving it with throwing another half baked
technology at the publishers will not work.

it's cHTML all over again
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-HTML)

AMP solves the right problem with a non solution.

~~~
acdha
The second point is a restatement of the first:

* a responsive website

* with views for desktop, mobile and tablet

#3 and #4 are similarly redundant

#1 makes all of the apps unnecessary, along with AMP and Facebook Instant. See
also the dismal return on the sunk cost for developing apps:
[http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-
app/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-app/)

The real omission, however, should have been #0: “high-quality content”. Sure,
you see the NYT, NPR, Guardian, et al. post a lot on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
but they were already some of the most popular content on the web and would
have been widely shared either way.

~~~
Arnavion
franze probably intended "responsive" to have its dictionary meaning - "not
sluggish".

~~~
acdha
It's possible but in the context of web design “responsive” has had a
specialized meaning for many years, going back to a very influential article
in 2010 which grouped older practices under that term:

[http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-
design](http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design)

It's somewhat unlikely that anyone working in front-end development in 2016
would assume the generic usage.

------
hackercomplex
Keep in mind that the AMP caching infrastructure will also be able to serve as
a tracking platform because it records every single IP address. This
effectively grants Google and associates a defacto monopoly in terms of an
unblockable mobile tracking platform in a world where ad-blockers are becoming
ubiquitous.

I think it's a smart move on their part actually, but what I assume will
eventually happen is other providers will come along and provide a similar
free infrastructure but without retaining logs and then everyone will migrate
to that. Google will have gotten the ball rolling, and benefited for a number
of years from the data, but ultimately people on the web prefer not to be
tracked.

~~~
zaphar

        but ultimately people on the web prefer not to be tracked.
    

It's curious because most people on the web pay lip service to this preference
but their actions typically indicate that they don't really care all that
much. The folks on Hacker News are in the minority of users whose actions
indicate they truly care.

~~~
codemac
Nah, I think they don't have the time to get up to speed enough to even
understand what it means to have their IP tracked, let alone understand the
lengths they would have to go to avoid being tracked.

Most of my non-technical friends are super concerned, and frequently tell me
how scary it is not knowing what to do or how to avoid it.

It's an active role the current ad-based industry takes to convince their
users that the tracking either doesn't matter or somehow empowers the user,
which are both demonstrably false.

------
fitzwatermellow
From the F.A.Q:

 __Accelerated Mobile Pages are just like any other HTML page, but with a
limited set of allowed technical functionality that is defined and governed by
the open source AMP spec __

And from the Spec:

 __Enable the AMP runtime to manage the loading of external resources, which
may slow down the initial render or cause jank. Allow AMP authors to include
functionality above and beyond standard HTML, while maintaining the security-
and performance-minded requirement that no author-written JavaScript is
executed __

Appears we won 't have access to Canvas2D, WebGL, WebRTC, Fetch and other
HTML5 Web APIs. AMP's subset of declarative elements and caching will be great
for longform-y "static" content. The kind of articles I find myself reading
more of on Mobile Chrome during down times in transit. Thinking of Medium
confessionals and NewYorker dispatches, etc.

But how do you implement something like ChartBeat? Snapshots of dynamic chart
images and data pre-rendered on the server and pushed out to the cdn? Sort of
eliminates the performance benefits of geospatial caching doesn't it...

I do take heart however in Tony Haile's pull quote from the ampproject.org
homepage:

 __The mobile open web experience is terrible and some have suggested it 's
too slow to compete. We can choose to see the mobile open web as a relic of
its time and flee to the warm embrace of closed platforms and apps. Or we can
say that the open web means something important to the world and if it’s
broken it’s our job to fix it. I think we should fix it. __

------
digitalclubb
The web is getting bigger, there is no denying that. People developing
responsive sites irresponsibly, adding large images, videos and JavaScript
libraries and frameworks.

What I don't understand is why search engines don't punish those individuals
with larger pages rather than move everyone to something new? Is this taking
us back to the mobile site days?

I love the concept of getting core content to the user fast but what is
stopping someone adding a 2MB amp-img to their page and then we are right back
where we were before?

------
VeejayRampay
Past all the considerations of content ownership and all, it seems to be quite
the technical feat, the impact on page load is real (or maybe my testing was
partial or biased).

~~~
espadrine
I'd argue it is more of a social feat than a technical one. It is still HTML,
after all.

The real underlying issue that AMP solves is ad bloat. Online newspapers tend
to include that one more ad library that tracks a particular thing that one ad
partner or one analytics team wishes to have, let alone visual bloat such as
"share as", "like", "comment" and other social widgets all implemented as
iframes with their own separate trackers, and the sum of it all has a large
impact on both download sizes and performance, since they are seldom
optimized. Oil on fire is the fact that there is generally no incentive to
remove libraries that no longer have a use.

AMP forces newspapers and other content providers reliant on advertising to
play nice. It gives them an incentive (through caching and better indexing)
which costs them the bloat.

------
manyoso
Even more centralization and single point of failure. If this continues the
web as envisioned will be entirely replaced by a centralized system of walled
gardens with big companies controlling access.

This is why we need IPFS sooner rather than later.

~~~
manyoso
The case for IPFS to combat these walled gardens:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?ebc=ANyPxKqMiNbStnEQHC-
kiEBSd1jI...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?ebc=ANyPxKqMiNbStnEQHC-
kiEBSd1jILZqa0BT0CONnIPhZaJx8DboPmzg3vqia97Wk1XMENc3rY3Bjtz6iTqoZ-lK-
mWqsshiIyQ&time_continue=3&v=HUVmypx9HGI)

------
alexatkeplar
Big fan of what AMP is doing, but I'm a little surprised by the statement
that:

> Today, multiple web metrics providers are on board, including Moat (who
> partner with Chartbeat), Nielsen, ComScore, Parse.ly, ClickTale, Adobe
> Analytics

As far as I know, our (Snowplow's) PR into AMP is the first and only (so far)
from a non-GA analytics vendor:

[https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/1358](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/pull/1358)

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?

------
r1ch
In order to make my completely static non-JS site AMP compliant do I have to
include the amp JS library or is Google smart enough to realize my site is
plenty fast enough as-is?

~~~
cbowal
It looks like you don't have to use AMP specifically - speeding up your site
is valid however you do it.

"Google made clear that AMP wasn’t the only way to speed up mobile pages."
[http://searchengineland.com/google-amp-coming-rank-
fast-2380...](http://searchengineland.com/google-amp-coming-rank-fast-238046)

------
glossyscr
I tried the AMP versions mentioned in the article on an iPhone 6 connected to
wifi and I am not impressed at all.

Something which loads _really_ instantly is D's forum, it's incredibly how
fast it is and it's written in D:

[http://forum.dlang.org/](http://forum.dlang.org/)

(I am not into D, just found this thing recently on reddit/programming)

------
tombrossman
From the article: _"...most ad servers (not just Google-owned DFP) will be
able to send ads in AMP pages. Some work remains to be done on the formats
that will be deemed acceptable in AMP pages."_ Deemed acceptable by who, and
doesn't this indicate it will become another walled garden?

~~~
shostack
Not sure why you were down-voted as it is a legit question.

I'd honestly be pretty surprised if they didn't just opt to support all IAB-
approved ad formats. The one format I could see being a big question mark is
"native ads." Outside of their increased Gmail ad presence, Google has been
curiously absent from the native advertising landscape.

~~~
alexschleber
> Google has been curiously absent from the native advertising landscape.
> Compare: [https://stratechery.com/2014/peak-
> google/](https://stratechery.com/2014/peak-google/)

~~~
shostack
Ah--love Ben's blog and podcast (listen to it several times a week during my
commute).

His point is a good one. In terms of feeds of potential branding interest,
beyond Youtube, Google's big (and mostly untapped) opportunity is in Gmail.

They made a stride to first assert control and doing users a favor by moving
things to the Promotions tab. Now they have their ads in the email "feed" in
that tab. The Inbox product, IMHO, was their attempt at redefining email into
an fully algorithmically-curated feed ala FB, Twitter and Reddit.

My personal bet is that Inbox was a proof of concept and they will force Gmail
to shift to that approach in the not too distant future. If users don't leave
en masse, I would not be surprised at all to see Google forcing advertisers to
pay to get into the inboxes of Gmail users--even users who have explicitly
asked for promotional emails. That was FB's brilliant gambit (that somewhat
blew up in their face). They convinced advertisers to invest in building an
audience on the FB platform (so FB owned the audience), let them see revenue
from it, and then switched from a "communicate all you like to everyone who
Likes you for free!" model to a "pay us on an auction model if you want to
reach anyone" model. Many advertisers consider it a huge bait-and-switch play,
but I can't deny that it seems to have been successful. And that is why I
won't be surprised to see Google follow suit there.

------
ksk
From:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html)

> The reality is that content can take several seconds to load, or, because
> the user abandons the slow page, never fully loads at all. Accelerated
> Mobile Pages are web pages designed to load instantaneously – they are a
> step towards a better mobile web for all.

That's kind of dishonest of Google. The "content" doesn't take longer to load.
The website does, but its because of Ads, pointless JS scripts that are spying
on the user and a whole host of things that are _NOT_CONTENT_.

In any case, even if creating a new standard, or reduced-HTML, or w/e made
sense, I'd be less skeptical if it wasn't controlled by an advertising
company.

------
mtgx
I'm fine with it long as all content/analytics don't pass through Google, but
I imagine many content sites will be lazy and let Google handle everything.

~~~
criddell
I wonder what happens when you combiner AMP pages and something like uBlock
Origin? Do you get fast page loads AND minimal tracking?

~~~
dsparkman
Probably a blank screen since AMP requires this in your pages: <style>body
{opacity: 0}</style><noscript><style>body {opacity: 1}</style></noscript>

~~~
criddell
uBlock blocks tracking, not scripting.

