2 ms·

"Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem." I really want to believe this. But how does AMP fit into this? I feel it is quite counter to

"Google has nothing to gain from hurting the open web ecosystem." I really want to believe this. But how does AMP fit into this? I feel it is quite counter to the idea of an open web. Please do not take this as an attack or criticism, I would like to, in fact, learn some better arguments in favour of why Google would support, rather than suppress an open web ecosystem.

eropple 7y ago
From the perspective of a service connecting eyeballs with the thing they're looking for (and some ads along the way), AMP is a relatively anodyne amplification on top of caching strategies. "Hey, build good, easily parsed and managed pages and we'll make everything Way Way Faster" is the argument. To be clear, I'm not saying that it is necessarily representative of reality, but that's the idea.
- throwaway77384 7y ago
  Interesting. It would appear I have been downvoted by someone for asking a question, which is a strange thing to do. Anyway, I thank you for your comment. I now feel I understand the matter / intent behind AMP a little better.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
AMP is a federated web alternative to closed apps and ecosystems like Apple News and FB Instant Articles. It's a specification built using existing web standards that allows anybody to build FB IA or Apple News without integrating directly with publishers.
themacguffinman 7y ago
Depends on what you mean by "an open web". If you consider "an open web" to be a publicly accessible network of documents and applications, it's practically absurd to suggest that Google - a company that makes almost all of its money from services that need to crawl everything it can find on the public internet - might want to hurt this. The more websites and applications that join the open web ecosystem and open themselves to public crawling and searching, the better it is for Google. Walled gardens like Apple News and Facebook Instant actually run counter to this open web. They can't be publicly indexed or crawled or searched, yet they have the valuable advantage of being really fast. I see AMP as an aggressive optimization designed to bring web performance up to par with native platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant. When a publisher chooses AMP instead of exclusively using those closed platforms, it's a win for the open web when their content uses web standards (AMP is merely a strict subset of web standards) accessible by anyone, not just Apple or Facebook users. I think nowadays "the open web ecosystem" has come to mean something different in discussions like this, closer in meaning to "the distributed web" or "a less corporate web". Google obviously doesn't care for that.

eropple 7y ago

From the perspective of a service connecting eyeballs with the thing they're looking for (and some ads along the way), AMP is a relatively anodyne amplification on top of caching strategies. "Hey, build good, easily parsed and managed pages and we'll make everything Way Way Faster" is the argument. To be clear, I'm not saying that it is necessarily representative of reality, but that's the idea.

throwaway77384 7y ago
Interesting. It would appear I have been downvoted by someone for asking a question, which is a strange thing to do. Anyway, I thank you for your comment. I now feel I understand the matter / intent behind AMP a little better.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

AMP is a federated web alternative to closed apps and ecosystems like Apple News and FB Instant Articles. It's a specification built using existing web standards that allows anybody to build FB IA or Apple News without integrating directly with publishers.

themacguffinman 7y ago

Depends on what you mean by "an open web". If you consider "an open web" to be a publicly accessible network of documents and applications, it's practically absurd to suggest that Google - a company that makes almost all of its money from services that need to crawl everything it can find on the public internet - might want to hurt this. The more websites and applications that join the open web ecosystem and open themselves to public crawling and searching, the better it is for Google. Walled gardens like Apple News and Facebook Instant actually run counter to this open web. They can't be publicly indexed or crawled or searched, yet they have the valuable advantage of being really fast. I see AMP as an aggressive optimization designed to bring web performance up to par with native platforms like Apple News and Facebook Instant. When a publisher chooses AMP instead of exclusively using those closed platforms, it's a win for the open web when their content uses web standards (AMP is merely a strict subset of web standards) accessible by anyone, not just Apple or Facebook users. I think nowadays "the open web ecosystem" has come to mean something different in discussions like this, closer in meaning to "the distributed web" or "a less corporate web". Google obviously doesn't care for that.