13 ms·

What annoys me is how Google is selling this project. At least Facebook is honest about their Instant Articles. This isn't an "open standard" guys, and it's no

by ducuboy 11y ago

What annoys me is how Google is selling this project. At least Facebook is honest about their Instant Articles. This isn't an "open standard" guys, and it's not about performance! It's about the single piece of js that's allowed on AMP pages and the amp-tags such as <amp-ad> and <amp-pixel> that only Google controls. Performance is just the story they are selling in exchange of absolute control of the Web. After all, any publisher can easily clean up their websites as they ought to do to make it AMP compliant, but use valid HTML tags instead of the invalid amp-tags. Google could have easily promoted performance by applying penalties to heavy pages via Page Rank. But it's not about performance. It's all about the money.

cramforce 11y ago
First of all this is not a Google-only project. There are many partners. See e.g. https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages-0 https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile... <amp-pixel> supports all kinds of tracking. You just give it a URL. Ironically it does not work with Google Analytics but we'll fix that eventually. Most others should work. <amp-ad> currently supports these ad networks https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/builtins/amp-ad.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/builtins/a... We are super happy to add more. We want to support all networks. You suggest elsewhere there is revenue sharing involved, but that is not true. amp-ad just loads an ad. This is controlled by the publishers and and their agreement with the advertiser. Google only plays a role if it happens to be the ad network (or the advertiser) involved.
- felipeerias 11y ago
  Taking into account that Google "happens to be" the largest ad company around, it is hard to not see this as a defensive move to protect themselves at a time when the disproportionately negative impact of ad-tech has put their business at the mercy of adblockers and native apps.
  - solofounder1 11y ago
    In general, I think that there is an important conversation to be had about how this newly proposed cacheing tier would effect the overall cat and mouse game between tracking networks and ad blockers on mobile phones. Since the web community is being asked to choose to adopt a new technology, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reason about what would be technically possible to achieve in terms of tracking tech with this architecture. Here one rough estimate: If ads are all served locally (from a single domain) then it becomes technically feasible to utilize a short-lived rotating mutation URI generation scheme. Under such a tracking system each ad unit URI would be instantiated "just in time" to redirect a certain amount of load after which it would expire away. This JIT transient URI generator could be aware of the domain's application routing table so that it can dynamically spin out each new tracking/ad unit URI in a camouflaged form. In other words each URI could appear to be only a mutated variation of organic cached content. In computer security parlance this would establish a "covert channel" on top of HTTP via a timing attack vector (extremely short-lived URLs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack I would imagine that ads propagated through such a system would be pretty much impossible for an ad-blocker to identify within a low-enough latency window. In other words by the time the ad unit's URI is discovered by a blocking server and it's clients are notified the URI has already vanished as if it never existed. What's I find slightly humorous about this approach to tracking is that the scheme would closely resemble several of the "blackhat SEO" techniques which are frowned upon by Matt Cutts' "Quality Guidelines" for example "link schemes", "automatically generated content", "cloaking", and "sneaky redirects". Surely it's unfathomable to think that Google would one day resort to such forms of trickery in order to confuse other search engines :) https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001971 https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001971 By the way this is only something I came up with earlier today and definitely not something that I've even heard discussed although I'm not in the advertising business myself. In other words it's entirely possible that I could have missed something here.
    - anonred 11y ago
      While there's bound to be other (more efficient) solutions, blockers could start filtering by the content returned. This sort of behavior leads to an arms race, with ad blockers ultimately losing (cost to detect >> cost to circumvent).
- gorhill 11y ago
  > You suggest elsewhere there is revenue sharing involved, but that is not true. It's the data sharing which is worrying. Exactly which entities have access to what data gathered by `ampproject.org`?
- tombrossman 11y ago
  Scanning your comments, I haven't learned about what tracking is accomplished by serving the https://cdn·ampproject·org/v0·js https://cdn·ampproject·org/v0·js file itself, can you please comment on what data (if any) is collected by being 'the' place all AMP sites phone home to on page load by default? Two other points, and I hope these are received as constructive criticism. 1- You only score 'B' on SSL labs for the domain serving the AMP JS file.[0] Maybe this is intentional so as to include support for Android devices that no longer get updates but it's not great security for the rest of us. 2- Your page explaining the project executes Google Analytics tracking code and has no privacy policy and does not disclose the fact that you are tracking visits. This is a breach of your very own Google Analytics T&C's[1] which read in part "...You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data...". Neither of these inspire confidence and I hope you can get at least one of them corrected soon. [0]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ampproject.org&s=74.125.224.40&latest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ampproject.or... [1]https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html
ducuboy 11y ago
AMP is just broken HTML, hardly a standard. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Fplatform%2Famp%2F2015%2F10%2F7%2F9467149%2Fgoogle-accelerated-mobile-pages-caching-preview https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.c...
- flipp3r 11y ago
  I think this tweet from the AML project lead sums up pretty well how much they thought about standards https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/651769139204259840 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/651769139204259840
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    So its Google they cant even implement the sitemaps.org standard fully to spec or handle robots.txt files with BOM markers. I wonder what the average Googler would make of OSI standards like x.400 and x.500.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  I don't understand why they don't just use data-* attributes and stay valid.
  - ducuboy 11y ago
    Absolute control.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      Please explain because that makes absolutely no sense. It's just an attribute.
- ducuboy 11y ago
  What about RSS? That offered good performance, was widely adopted and was a real standard working for both publishers and consumers. Remember who actually killed it? Yeah, that was also Google.. by discontinuing their Reader - a very good tool with lots of users but no revenue. That's how much open standards matter. Too bad @aaronsw is not around anymore, he would have said something about AMP.
scrollaway 11y ago
What are they selling, exactly? Why does this need to be a framework, with js and all that? I'm not asking cynically, and following it up with "oh, they should just do x instead".... I legitimately do not understand what's going on here. What's the added functionality? I read the article twice, I don't get it. I'm going through the spec, I don't get it. I looked at the article source, I really don't get it, it's just html and common sense.
- ducuboy 11y ago
  A platform for sharing ad revenue. They deliver all the amp-ads via that single piece of js, and will share some of the revenue with the publishers. It's not a bad idea after all, if only they had presented it for what it is: a Google fork of the Web. The "performance story" is just the bullshit.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    If they're putting ads in custom tags that makes it extremely easy to block them. I think it's nothing so sinister as a "fork of the web", but a badly thought out approach of going back to faster loading web1.0 by recognizing that quite a lot of JS adds no value to the end user.
    - ducuboy 11y ago
      My point is that this project is not about providing value to the user. Google could have done that more easily. It may not be so sinister because it's a badly thought out approach indeed. Although they got quite a few big partners already, this undertake requires rewriting the whole Web which is too much to ask even if you are Google.
    - pookeh 11y ago
      It also becomes extremely easy for browser vendors to not allow blocking them.
      - pjc50 11y ago
spankalee 11y ago
AMP tags are custom elements, they're not invalid. See http://www.w3.org/TR/custom-elements/ http://www.w3.org/TR/custom-elements/
- nateberkopec 11y ago
  Authored by Google, how surprising. Also, I'm not familiar with the W3C process, but since this is a working draft, I'd assume they're invalid until the draft is finalized.
  - spankalee 11y ago
    Yes, custom elements are not fully finalized, but all of the browser vendors are invested in the spec and finalizing it. There is a lot of activity on it right now.
  - kllrnohj 11y ago
    > Also, I'm not familiar with the W3C process Then don't pull random statements out of your ass about it? What are accepted as standards spend most of their life as W3C working drafts. The W3C doesn't finalize a draft until the feature is obsolete, more or less. WebWorkers, for example, is still a working draft. So is Web Storage. The only thing that has ever mattered is browser support, not W3C specs.
    - rictic 11y ago
      To expand on this, custom elements are supported in Chrome and Firefox (behind a flag in FF at the moment), and there has been public support from both Webkit and Edge, as well as high quality, high performance polyfills.
coldtea 11y ago
>What annoys me is how Google is selling this project. At least Facebook is honest about their Instant Articles. This isn't an "open standard" guys, and it's not about performance! It's about the single piece of js that's allowed on AMP pages and the amp-tags such as <amp-ad> and <amp-pixel> that only Google controls. This is not a Google project.
- barkingcat 11y ago
  if you run a whois on ampproject.org, the results clearly indicate it's owned by google. Registrant ID:mmr-87489 Registrant Name:DNS Admin Registrant Organization:Google Inc. Registrant Street: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Registrant City:Mountain View Registrant State/Province:CA Registrant Postal Code:94043 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.6502530000 Registrant Phone Ext: Registrant Fax: +1.6502530001 Registrant Fax Ext: Registrant Email:dns-admin@google.com The tech lead of the project is Malte Ubl who by their twitter page : @cramforce indicates that "I make www internet web pages for Google. " Unless it's a 20% off time project (or a side project of some kind), I can't understand why you say it's not a Google project if it's being funded by google and made by a google employee.
  - cramforce 11y ago
    Yep, I'm a Google employee. ampproject.org has the full list of partners working together. One example is https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages-0 https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile...
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >I can't understand why you say it's not a Google project if it's being funded by google and made by a google employee. For the same way that tons of open/collaborative projects with multiple partners are not "X projects" even if they started and/or are hosted by X. Heck, even something like Webkit is not an "Apple project"... Downvotes? Are you kidding me? What part of "open source initiative" containing multiple industry leaders (like Twitter, and lots of others) don't people understand?
ausjke 11y ago
Google's slogan shifted from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing", the former is arguable to say the least based on its records, but moving to the latter is worse, as google can just do the "right" thing for its own benefit, which could be selfish, and blatantly evil sometimes.
- kllrnohj 11y ago
  > Google's slogan shifted from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing" False. Google's slogan did not change. Also the full slogan for Alphabet is "do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect." This cannot be selfish & blatantly evil.
kllrnohj 11y ago
> This isn't an "open standard" guys They never said it was? The web site just says AMP is open source (which it is). It says nothing about standards. > Google could have easily promoted performance by applying penalties to heavy pages via Page Rank. They have been since 2010: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-sit...
bitmapbrother 11y ago
What annoys me are people who speak out of ignorance without really knowing what they're talking about, but like to give the impression to others they do. AMP is an open source project any publisher can use and tailor to their needs. If you don't want to factor Google into the solution then you don't have to. But, keep on praising Facebook because you at least got their agenda right.

by ducuboy 11y ago

cramforce 11y ago

First of all this is not a Google-only project. There are many partners. See e.g. https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages-0 https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile... <amp-pixel> supports all kinds of tracking. You just give it a URL. Ironically it does not work with Google Analytics but we'll fix that eventually. Most others should work. <amp-ad> currently supports these ad networks https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/builtins/amp-ad.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/builtins/a... We are super happy to add more. We want to support all networks. You suggest elsewhere there is revenue sharing involved, but that is not true. amp-ad just loads an ad. This is controlled by the publishers and and their agreement with the advertiser. Google only plays a role if it happens to be the ad network (or the advertiser) involved.

felipeerias 11y ago
Taking into account that Google "happens to be" the largest ad company around, it is hard to not see this as a defensive move to protect themselves at a time when the disproportionately negative impact of ad-tech has put their business at the mercy of adblockers and native apps.
- solofounder1 11y ago
  In general, I think that there is an important conversation to be had about how this newly proposed cacheing tier would effect the overall cat and mouse game between tracking networks and ad blockers on mobile phones. Since the web community is being asked to choose to adopt a new technology, I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reason about what would be technically possible to achieve in terms of tracking tech with this architecture. Here one rough estimate: If ads are all served locally (from a single domain) then it becomes technically feasible to utilize a short-lived rotating mutation URI generation scheme. Under such a tracking system each ad unit URI would be instantiated "just in time" to redirect a certain amount of load after which it would expire away. This JIT transient URI generator could be aware of the domain's application routing table so that it can dynamically spin out each new tracking/ad unit URI in a camouflaged form. In other words each URI could appear to be only a mutated variation of organic cached content. In computer security parlance this would establish a "covert channel" on top of HTTP via a timing attack vector (extremely short-lived URLs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_attack I would imagine that ads propagated through such a system would be pretty much impossible for an ad-blocker to identify within a low-enough latency window. In other words by the time the ad unit's URI is discovered by a blocking server and it's clients are notified the URI has already vanished as if it never existed. What's I find slightly humorous about this approach to tracking is that the scheme would closely resemble several of the "blackhat SEO" techniques which are frowned upon by Matt Cutts' "Quality Guidelines" for example "link schemes", "automatically generated content", "cloaking", and "sneaky redirects". Surely it's unfathomable to think that Google would one day resort to such forms of trickery in order to confuse other search engines :) https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001971 https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/6001971 By the way this is only something I came up with earlier today and definitely not something that I've even heard discussed although I'm not in the advertising business myself. In other words it's entirely possible that I could have missed something here.
  - anonred 11y ago
    While there's bound to be other (more efficient) solutions, blockers could start filtering by the content returned. This sort of behavior leads to an arms race, with ad blockers ultimately losing (cost to detect >> cost to circumvent).
gorhill 11y ago
> You suggest elsewhere there is revenue sharing involved, but that is not true. It's the data sharing which is worrying. Exactly which entities have access to what data gathered by `ampproject.org`?
tombrossman 11y ago
Scanning your comments, I haven't learned about what tracking is accomplished by serving the https://cdn·ampproject·org/v0·js https://cdn·ampproject·org/v0·js file itself, can you please comment on what data (if any) is collected by being 'the' place all AMP sites phone home to on page load by default? Two other points, and I hope these are received as constructive criticism. 1- You only score 'B' on SSL labs for the domain serving the AMP JS file.[0] Maybe this is intentional so as to include support for Android devices that no longer get updates but it's not great security for the rest of us. 2- Your page explaining the project executes Google Analytics tracking code and has no privacy policy and does not disclose the fact that you are tracking visits. This is a breach of your very own Google Analytics T&C's[1] which read in part "...You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data...". Neither of these inspire confidence and I hope you can get at least one of them corrected soon. [0]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ampproject.org&s=74.125.224.40&latest https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ampproject.or... [1]https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html

ducuboy 11y ago

AMP is just broken HTML, hardly a standard. https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Fplatform%2Famp%2F2015%2F10%2F7%2F9467149%2Fgoogle-accelerated-mobile-pages-caching-preview https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.c...

flipp3r 11y ago
I think this tweet from the AML project lead sums up pretty well how much they thought about standards https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/651769139204259840 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/651769139204259840
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  So its Google they cant even implement the sitemaps.org standard fully to spec or handle robots.txt files with BOM markers. I wonder what the average Googler would make of OSI standards like x.400 and x.500.
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
I don't understand why they don't just use data-* attributes and stay valid.
- ducuboy 11y ago
  Absolute control.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    Please explain because that makes absolutely no sense. It's just an attribute.
ducuboy 11y ago
What about RSS? That offered good performance, was widely adopted and was a real standard working for both publishers and consumers. Remember who actually killed it? Yeah, that was also Google.. by discontinuing their Reader - a very good tool with lots of users but no revenue. That's how much open standards matter. Too bad @aaronsw is not around anymore, he would have said something about AMP.

scrollaway 11y ago

What are they selling, exactly? Why does this need to be a framework, with js and all that? I'm not asking cynically, and following it up with "oh, they should just do x instead".... I legitimately do not understand what's going on here. What's the added functionality? I read the article twice, I don't get it. I'm going through the spec, I don't get it. I looked at the article source, I really don't get it, it's just html and common sense.

ducuboy 11y ago
A platform for sharing ad revenue. They deliver all the amp-ads via that single piece of js, and will share some of the revenue with the publishers. It's not a bad idea after all, if only they had presented it for what it is: a Google fork of the Web. The "performance story" is just the bullshit.
- pjc50 11y ago
  If they're putting ads in custom tags that makes it extremely easy to block them. I think it's nothing so sinister as a "fork of the web", but a badly thought out approach of going back to faster loading web1.0 by recognizing that quite a lot of JS adds no value to the end user.
  - ducuboy 11y ago
    My point is that this project is not about providing value to the user. Google could have done that more easily. It may not be so sinister because it's a badly thought out approach indeed. Although they got quite a few big partners already, this undertake requires rewriting the whole Web which is too much to ask even if you are Google.
  - pookeh 11y ago
    It also becomes extremely easy for browser vendors to not allow blocking them.
    - pjc50 11y ago

spankalee 11y ago

AMP tags are custom elements, they're not invalid. See http://www.w3.org/TR/custom-elements/ http://www.w3.org/TR/custom-elements/

nateberkopec 11y ago
Authored by Google, how surprising. Also, I'm not familiar with the W3C process, but since this is a working draft, I'd assume they're invalid until the draft is finalized.
- spankalee 11y ago
  Yes, custom elements are not fully finalized, but all of the browser vendors are invested in the spec and finalizing it. There is a lot of activity on it right now.
- kllrnohj 11y ago
  > Also, I'm not familiar with the W3C process Then don't pull random statements out of your ass about it? What are accepted as standards spend most of their life as W3C working drafts. The W3C doesn't finalize a draft until the feature is obsolete, more or less. WebWorkers, for example, is still a working draft. So is Web Storage. The only thing that has ever mattered is browser support, not W3C specs.
  - rictic 11y ago
    To expand on this, custom elements are supported in Chrome and Firefox (behind a flag in FF at the moment), and there has been public support from both Webkit and Edge, as well as high quality, high performance polyfills.

coldtea 11y ago

>What annoys me is how Google is selling this project. At least Facebook is honest about their Instant Articles. This isn't an "open standard" guys, and it's not about performance! It's about the single piece of js that's allowed on AMP pages and the amp-tags such as <amp-ad> and <amp-pixel> that only Google controls. This is not a Google project.

barkingcat 11y ago
if you run a whois on ampproject.org, the results clearly indicate it's owned by google. Registrant ID:mmr-87489 Registrant Name:DNS Admin Registrant Organization:Google Inc. Registrant Street: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Registrant City:Mountain View Registrant State/Province:CA Registrant Postal Code:94043 Registrant Country:US Registrant Phone:+1.6502530000 Registrant Phone Ext: Registrant Fax: +1.6502530001 Registrant Fax Ext: Registrant Email:dns-admin@google.com The tech lead of the project is Malte Ubl who by their twitter page : @cramforce indicates that "I make www internet web pages for Google. " Unless it's a 20% off time project (or a side project of some kind), I can't understand why you say it's not a Google project if it's being funded by google and made by a google employee.
- cramforce 11y ago
  Yep, I'm a Google employee. ampproject.org has the full list of partners working together. One example is https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile-pages-0 https://blog.twitter.com/2015/introducing-accelerated-mobile...
- coldtea 11y ago
  >I can't understand why you say it's not a Google project if it's being funded by google and made by a google employee. For the same way that tons of open/collaborative projects with multiple partners are not "X projects" even if they started and/or are hosted by X. Heck, even something like Webkit is not an "Apple project"... Downvotes? Are you kidding me? What part of "open source initiative" containing multiple industry leaders (like Twitter, and lots of others) don't people understand?

ausjke 11y ago

Google's slogan shifted from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing", the former is arguable to say the least based on its records, but moving to the latter is worse, as google can just do the "right" thing for its own benefit, which could be selfish, and blatantly evil sometimes.

kllrnohj 11y ago
> Google's slogan shifted from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing" False. Google's slogan did not change. Also the full slogan for Alphabet is "do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect." This cannot be selfish & blatantly evil.

kllrnohj 11y ago

> This isn't an "open standard" guys They never said it was? The web site just says AMP is open source (which it is). It says nothing about standards. > Google could have easily promoted performance by applying penalties to heavy pages via Page Rank. They have been since 2010: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-sit...

bitmapbrother 11y ago

What annoys me are people who speak out of ignorance without really knowing what they're talking about, but like to give the impression to others they do. AMP is an open source project any publisher can use and tailor to their needs. If you don't want to factor Google into the solution then you don't have to. But, keep on praising Facebook because you at least got their agenda right.