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Google Stories
- humblepie 6y ago(crickets...)
- stevenpetryk 6y agoLet's take a moment of silence in solidarity with all the engineers who will now have to make their company's blog support this.
- freediver 6y agoAnd let's take a moment of silence in solidarity for all engineers who worked on this when this gets scraped.
- bigdict 6y agoOr a moment of noise in solidarity with the engineers who got promoted for shipping the shiny new thing.
- tsjq 6y agoBang !!
- nullsense 6y agoAnd 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.
- dmje 6y agoMaybe a moment of silence for people who read and write long form content and like to immerse rather than skim... ~ sigh ~
- frozenlettuce 6y agoBut having to turn pages is better to serve ads, as you need more effort to dodge them
- swiley 6y agoMaybe also one for blind and vision impaired people, this looks like just a sequence of videos.
- jeffrallen 6y agoIf we changed these moments of silence into shots of tequila, we'd really get this party started!
- TameAntelope 6y agoIt reads like you can host your own stories, but since it’s in a “story” format I’m having trouble following the details...
- johnatwork 6y ago"It's been an incredible journey, and we would like to thank all those who have shared it with us."
- jorgesborges 6y agoI 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.
- fluidcruft 6y agoBut does Google Search have an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp yet?
- 3np 6y agono but there is dart
- hyperdimension 6y agoWell, GMail does read email, fulfilling jwz's law, so there's only one more law to go. Maybe something like emacs, but AMP-based, and we'll have the worst of two worlds!
- halfmatthalfcat 6y agoI wonder if Google’s turnover is such that when this does inevitably get shuttered, those who worked on it are still at Google.
- joshstrange 6y agoIf 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").
- throwaway3699 6y agoThis 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.
- odiroot 6y agoBut they can be happy for their manager, who'd get promoted for pushing this out. Maybe they all will even get some bonus!
- rchaud 6y agoThey 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. [0]: https://wordpress.org/plugins/web-stories/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/web-stories/
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoThat's what engineers do?
- Cyph0n 6y agoI know we're in December, but I still made sure to double-check the date...
- otobrglez 6y agoThis is silly.
- paxys 6y agoOh god no
- itronitron 6y agoSeems like a TikTok ripoff
- forbiddenvoid 6y agoEveryone: Google: Stories are cool now, no?
- scrollaway 6y agoWow, 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.
- bmmayer1 6y agoAn 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ra7 6y agoLooking forward to how this will clutter simple Google search results!
- mtw 6y agooh cool! another google product that's going to be deprecated in a couple of years
- Omnus 6y agoIt'll be dead within 18-24 months.
- aglavine 6y agofor anyone in your circles
- mromanuk 6y agoI read the page, not sure what is about it yet.
- aerovistae 6y agoI'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.
- dhnajsjdnd 6y agoSo they should take the Google name off it?
- aerovistae 6y agoI 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.
- function_seven 6y agoHere'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 :)
- nullsense 6y agoIt seems their brand is "socially awkward media"
- 6y ago
- Ceezy 6y agoAre they copying Facebook 4 years after they copied snapchat?
- vernie 6y agoNo, they're copying Twitter 4 years after they copied Instagram 4 years after they copied Snapchat.
- stingraycharles 6y agoAm 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.
- pea 6y agoI came to make the exact same comment - what on earth is this?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrlala 6y agoI 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.
- jtsiskin 6y agoThe 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.
- ativzzz 6y agoInteractive advertisements similar to those that already exist on snapchat/instagram
- wisty 6y ago> What are Stories? > 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.
- crazysim 6y agoI can already draft a PR to killedbygoogle for this.
- searchableguy 6y agoStories 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. This is a natural extension of web.
- kylebenzle 6y agoYikes, that's sad. Sounds like you need to meet some new people.
- itronitron 6y agowould be fun if they feature Timnit's story
- collsni 6y agoWeb is now hot garbage.
- foota 6y agoLooks 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. Edit: here's the technical documentation, https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=stories https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
- greatgib 6y agoSo good job Google, the page is unreadable on an Android phone without having an epilepsy attack!
- corobo 6y agoClassic Google and social. Last on the scene, overdoes it, no users+ 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
- jtsiskin 6y agoI 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)
- singhrac 6y agoI 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.
- rchaud 6y agoI'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.
- runawaybottle 6y agoDamn, Google is lame as fuck.
- Fragoel2 6y agoI guess stories will go down in history as the perfect example of a feature that was perfect in a single product (Instagram) and everyone tried to copy it in its own product, failing miserably.
- searchableguy 6y agoInstagram copied it from snapchat.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoAnd it wasn't even Facebook's first attempt to copy it - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/10/snapchat-clones-facebook-copies https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/10/snapchat-... Though the best quote in that article is Kevin Systrom: > Just like when Facebook invented the [News] Feed, and every social product was like, ‘That’s an innovation, how do we adapt that to our network,’ you’re going to see stories pop up in other networks over time, because it’s one of the best ways to show visual information in chronological order.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blakesterz 6y agoAfter scrolling for what felt like forever... I finally got down to: "It’s amazing what you can do with a story. Web Stories can take many forms. The best-in-class examples below provide just a taste of what’s possible in this engaging format." They have a bunch of examples, so I watched several, hoping to understand how this thing works, and why it's as good as they say. I guess it's a clone of Facebook stories? You somehow piece together a bunch of REALLY short videos or images, and then it makes a little movie. The best-in-class examples were hard to watch, and I can see no reason why I'd ever prefer this format over anything else. Ever. I reallllly don't get why they did this or why anyone would use it.
- cratermoon 6y ago"When TicToc gets banned we'll be the next hot thing" -- Alphabet execs, probably.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SingAlong 6y agoI just tried a few things. Sharing notes here incase anyone wants an overview. I tried visiting a few sites that had stories: * https://nowthisnews.com/stories/paralympic-swimmer-builds-makeshift-pool-to-train-during-shutdown/ https://nowthisnews.com/stories/paralympic-swimmer-builds-ma... * https://www.lonelyplanet.com/stories/5-destinations-to-see-wildlife-with-your-kids-4/ https://www.lonelyplanet.com/stories/5-destinations-to-see-w... What I don't see: * I visited the home pages of those sites. I'm not sure how to open up stories if I were an internet user just passing by. * I don't see a way to exit the stories experience other than clicking a link/article * How to open a story from any web page on a desktop (It is called "Web Stories" so I assumed a few things) This seems to be build on top of AMP: * https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/visual_story/start_story/?format=stories https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis... * https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/integrate/embed-stories/?format=stories https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/integrate...
- rchaud 6y ago> I visited the home pages of those sites. I'm not sure how to open up stories if I were an internet user just passing by. That's probably by design. The stories are meant to be discovered while searching on Google. Of course a site owner should have the common sense to include a separate section on their site for stories. In most CMSs, It would be as simple as setting a 'web stories' category, then adding a link to the navigation that takes them to a dynamically generated page, something like "example.com/web-stories/"
- WaitWaitWha 6y agoWait, wait, what is it?
- bdd 6y agoIs there a betting pool for this being the most quickly retired Google product ever? I have some extra cash lying around.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIs it April fools day? What's next GitHub Stories? Stack Overflow Stories! Hacker News Stories?
- chaosharmonic 6y agoActually, VS Code stories. [0] Also LinkedIn has them now. Which I would argue is still better than LinkedIn's other new addition, an entirely new black hole for event invites. As if the signal-to-noise ratio for these weren't bad enough on Facebook... [0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.stories https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.sto...
- sg47 6y agoGoogle Story will become History in a year. Why bother?
- dorkinspace 6y agoBut seriously, why would anyone be an early adopter to Google tech anymore. There's a good chance that whatever it is will be killed in a few years, so I tend to just not bother anymore. I used to be the first to any new Google tech. Android, google Fi, google play music, and on and on. Now, I'm working towards degoogling entirely.
- viro 6y agoThis is getting silly at this point.
- kylebenzle 6y agoI agree, BUT one thing that has blown my mind and forced me to reconsider a lot of this stuff that that women make 70-80% of consumer purchases. So, if you are advertising, you are pretty much advertising to women. The ruination of Reddit made no sense to me, Facebook made no sense to me, Instagram, etc. all that nonsense made no sense to me, until I realized that ALL of that stuff is for women. Seen in this light it seems to make more sense and not be so "silly" after all. [0] https://www.inc.com/amy-nelson/women-drive-majority-of-consumer-purchasing-its-time-to-meet-their-needs.html https://www.inc.com/amy-nelson/women-drive-majority-of-consu...
- Meai 6y agoTrue and now imagine that 70% of the web is accessed through mobile devices today. The format of these web stories is basically identical to a vertical phone, I think they exist so mobile users browse through more content more quickly. These decisions may not seem to make much sense for us now because browsing on a desktop always feels more efficient but they aren't designed to be efficient for us, they are supposed to be efficient for a somewhat desinterested mobile phone user who was going to click away but now he or she sees a flashy little story and thinks "eh ok, I'll watch what they want". Google may even envision a future where the normal search list results are an advanced feature and regular users all prefer to click on stories because that's where all the offers and gimmicks and easy to digest information is in. Ever since I underestimated TikTok, I am a little more careful to dismiss these new developments. In a way, these mini stories are another variation of tiktok mini stories.
- eplanit 6y agoAnother example of how Google just doesn't make exciting technology anymore.
- blt 6y agoThey still make exciting technology. Google's search is still far better than the competition. The Pixel computational photography app is cutting edge. Their translation and speech synthesis are great. They are still good at "organizing the world's information". They fail when they try to mimic their competitors. Their cloud services trail Amazon. Their hardware trails Apple. Their social media trails... everybody. You can see it in their intranets. Google uses personal web pages, forums, and search. It is similar to the internet in 2004. Facebook uses a miniature copy of Facebook.
- sellyme 6y ago> Their social media trails... everybody. While it still existed, Google+ was far better than any other popular social media site around. I'm sure I don't need to offer any critique of Facebook, and Twitter's UX was an absolute disaster before they implemented usable threading. Sure, our grandmothers weren't going to start using it, but I've seen what they're posting on Facebook and as far as I'm concerned that was an extreme positive.
- skinkestek 6y agoYep. Google+ became brilliant a couple of years before ot shuttered. It had working pseudonymity. I could also post to different contexts from the same persona. It was easy to read. I experienced little spam and next to no politics. Probably more.
- skinkestek 6y ago> Google's search is still far better than the competition. Bing now gives me results from the customer intranets kind of like an improved version of the old Google Desktop Search. Google has, despite us telling them again and again, "improved" search to the point where it can find thousands of pages that contains something somehow similar to what I searched for, yet completely irrelevant. I.e. not worse than the competitors, just equally bad. Except maybe Google fails in more spectacular ways on search thanks to AI: some of the irrelevant results feel uncanny, like: I can see how they got there, but seriously: it doesn't match what I searched for and it utterly irrelevant.
- jug 6y agoI think it is a new attempt at AMP? AMP 2.0? But I also think this one will be killed in a few years. A big point with stories is to have you publish them to the friends _who care_ in a network. A social network. A user googling to get to a website isn't the same kind of user. That's not the user who wants to engage with you on a more personal level: that user would instead befriend you on Instagram. The googling user is likely rather after information, contact details or the like. So I think Google will be a victim of the "distanced" users of theirs here. Google has users googling things with a purpose, whether it's a recipe, a review or to shop things. They aren't looking for feeds there -- they already have (too?) many ways to get that. They want distilled information. You know, what Google's search engine is designed to get. What they built their brand on: finding information fast. I think people are moving away from the "generic web" to engage on a personal level, not towards it, because a smartphone's social network app is more intimate. But sure, if the price is right, I guess some might adopt this, if not only as sort of a SEO tool. But I think the value as a product won't even be on the same chart as what stories provide social networks. Personally, I think stories are a terrible format to engage with users in the way Google aims for here, actually trying to take this format seriously and not just memes and simple ad hoc stuff. Just look at VICE's example here: https://www.vice.com/stories/inside-my-mind-oliver-tree/ https://www.vice.com/stories/inside-my-mind-oliver-tree/ What in heaven's name? Multiple clicks about god knows what just to finally get more of it in my mail?
- Arkdy 6y agoPart of AMP (1) is a web component library grounded in the extensible web manifesto (2). The plan was that the browser vendors give developers deeper access so that they could test new elements/standards through web components and polyfills. The AMP component library is one example of this, and stories are one of their forms. So basically if you use their tags to structure your content, it creates a ig/sc style Web Story. The structure that they have is (3): Story -> Pages -> Layers -> Elements Each page represents a tappable screen, Layers occupy the full screen, stack and have layout defaults like fill or lower-third and Elements can be regular html elements or other AMP components. I think that it's a neat way of organizing pages of information and made a clojure wrapper around it here: https://github.com/rainbow-bamboo/sargam https://github.com/rainbow-bamboo/sargam 1. https://amp.dev/about/mission-and-vision/ https://amp.dev/about/mission-and-vision/ 2. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto/blob/master/READM... 3. https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/visual_story/parts_of_story/?format=stories https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
- forgotmysn 6y agoGoogle trying to get back into the social media game. because they have been so successful at it in the past.
- turtlebits 6y agoThe Google app on my iPhone enabled this a few weeks ago (The home section shows news below the search bar.) The UX was extremely confusing as there was no scrolling, swiping changed stories, and tapping went to the next page. The content was 90% image and 10% text and was extremely annoying to read. It was also inconsistent from other content, as unlike the other "non-story" items, I could not change preferences (ie ignore the content from a site or ignore the topic). The same set of stories showed up for a week before I just turned the whole feature off.
- hedora 6y agoAlso, the image moves slowly behind the text, somehow inducing motion sickness without forcing the user to sit in a car. It’s like the blink tag, but instead of being the result of a drunken bet on Castro St in Mountain View, it’s the result of $1,000,000’s in engineering effort and focus groups.
- jon-wood 6y ago> The UX was extremely confusing as there was no scrolling, swiping changed stories, and tapping went to the next page. The content was 90% image and 10% text and was extremely annoying to read. Yup, as much as I also hate the format, that's the format of stories as popularised by Snapchat/Instagram/TikTok etc. Keep it all very slick, but devoid of content.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoI hope when they put this on the search results page, it’s gonna be in a single easily to block div.
- rafaelturk 6y agoIMO this just as evil as AMP, sounds silly but its a sign that Google remains dedicated to kill Open Internet standards and replace them with proprietary formats. Hopefully HN community will help to debunk this. Another take away: Lots have pointed that the design is `silly`. Well I think is was intentional and in the context of what Google is trying to achieve well designed. The layout of Google Stories is a sign that modern users don't read anymore. All stories are pure images, conceptual images with little text as possible.
- ihuman 6y ago> IMO this just as evil as AMP That's because it is AMP https://amp.dev/about/stories/ https://amp.dev/about/stories/
- lmedinas 6y agoanother "stories" wannabe... how creative. It seems for google it wasn't enough to have this copycat feature with Youtube now also Google itself.
- Giorgi 6y agoGod damn it Google need to quit trying to make their own social network happen, it wont happen
- cambalache 6y agoWhen I see things like this I laugh and laugh and laugh about the naive view usually presented in HN that the "best minds of our generation" are all in FAANGs. Move over Peter Scholze, Terry Tao and Magnus Carlsen, the Google(TM) kids who just copied TikTok/Instagram have just arrived.
- kace91 6y agoWell, that's the complain isn't it? That the technical skills are being wasted on glorified marketing companies. If you hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design your bathroom, you can't use the fact that you end up looking at a toilet as proof that he's not great.
- cambalache 6y agoWell, they did come up with that "innovation", didnt they?
- kace91 6y agoNot really, I don't think anyone's claiming that Google's managers and product owners are the geniuses the world is missing out on. It's the engineering skills that are considered wasted.
- TameAntelope 6y agoAh geez, I really don’t want to derail this, but Magnus Carlsen is not one of the “best minds of our generation”, he’s remarkably good at a game that rewards memory and pattern matching. I don’t think even Magnus Carlsen thinks of himself in that way, no one in the chess world does, as far as I know. Most serious chess players don’t make the mistake of thinking their skills translate very well.
- Cederfjard 6y agoI mean, what does ”best mind” even mean though? For some definitions he might fit the bill.
- iamgopal 6y agoBecause it was there. What ? Domain name.
- davidw 6y ago"Visual stories that feel like yours, because they are." Well, at least until the product doesn't gain much traction and Google kills it.
- londons_explore 6y agoThese you get to host on your own domain, so Google can't kill it,
- imbnwa 6y agoAll the world really is becoming a stage. John Maus was right about "the stage" being the only place where people can transform into different subjectivities.[0] [0] https://youtu.be/A4b0c7bdzfg?t=40 https://youtu.be/A4b0c7bdzfg?t=40
- meibo 6y agoI actually think that this is nice. Stories are a quick and easy way to consume light content. And that's really it, you wouldn't be using this for Wikipedia-style articles.
- rnmp 6y ago* lost it
- peanut_worm 6y agoWhy do all of these landing pages make zero effort to say what the hell the product is
- hedora 6y agoI imagine the people who thought the stories UI was acceptable also signed off on the landing page.
- corentin88 6y agoSeems like a good format to follow a recipe online!
- ChrisArchitect 6y agothis is from like 2-3 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700491
- philshem 6y agoIf I could host “stories” on my own personal blog/website - with a permanent link on my own domain, instead of a 3rd party platform, I might finally use that “story” format. Probably not, but maybe.
- obilgic 6y ago> A Web Story is a full-screen visual storytelling experience that conveys information with images, videos, graphics, audio, and more. It's perfect for users who want bite-sized, visually-rich content. Better Intro: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/visual_story/parts_of_story/?format=stories https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
- stinger 6y agodid they just steal the idea from snapchat and make it their own?
- vincentmarle 6y agoSpiegel's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can support Stories. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
- nbzso 6y agoSomeone in Big G is making mashup between Instagram Stories and Google Amp. Nice effort but it will sink as a rock to the bottom if left alone. Sadly they will try to integrate this in Android, if is not already integrated. "Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform." - It's tied kid, to Google search with "a story protocol" as you sad it.
- rektide 6y agoTHANK YOU TITLE for calling this Google Stories. 100% yes. Google Web Stories, if you must include the Web part of the proper name.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThe sole reason this is called "Web Stories" is because the AMP team believes their proprietary fork of the web constitutes being part of "team web", as opposed to apps.
- rektide 6y agoI will say they have done good, good work. I don't think they think their specific tech fully consititutes the web: I don't think they are so delusional, mad, misguided as that. To the teams credit though, the web was doing bad. Performance was bad. Sites were bad. In way too many cases. AMP has done better. But they still need to show some modesty & humility & recognize the web is a wider thing, not their personal domain, which titles like "Web Stories" fails to show. Plenty of other folks also do excellent web.
- slowkow 6y agoWhen can we expect to find Google Stories here? https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- nainarb 6y agoThis isn't new. This has been there for many years.
- jdlyga 6y agoHacker News, March 2023: Google Shutters Google Stories, encourages users to migrate to Google News
- tartoran 6y agoSeptember 2020!
- freetime2 6y agoAs a user, what I really want is just high-quality information. No click-bait headlines, auto-play movies, or hijacking standard browser scrolling. Images are fine if they actually help to convey useful information, but beyond that less is more. I'd also prefer to see less opinion-based content out of Google News and more factual reporting... and a lot of times I feel like these "story" type articles tend to cherry-pick the facts to fit into whatever narrative they are trying to tell. I understand that other people might have different preferences, and I'm sure Google has a bunch of data that proves this stuff improves click-through rates and engagement. But I have been checking Google News several times a day out of habit for years now, and I think it's time to break that habit. Much better I think to just frequent a small number of high-quality sources than to try to drink from the firehose of crap on Google News.
- risyachka 6y agoWill probably be closed in a few years;
- phs318u 6y agoI give it 2 years before they deep-six it.
- zaroth 6y agoThis is like Google found those click-bait stories about the person who discovered a hidden room in their house, where you have to keep clicking next to read another sentence of text because it generates more impressions.... and Google was jealous of the engagement stats and decided to copy it. It would be really, really funny if it wasn't so horribly, horribly sad.
- bookmarkable 6y agoHolding out for Google to reintroduce Flash Player next.
- imgabe 6y agoWhat are people getting out of stories? I look at them sometimes on Instagram and I don't understand how this is better than just putting the same images in a post. I guess I'm old now and I don't get what these wacky kids are doing. For this, how is it different than a webpage? Why would I do whatever this is instead of just making a webpage with the same content? Is it just the interface where you swipe from one to the next? Is that supposed to be some amazing innovation?
- mdni007 6y agoI think it has something to do with the fact that posts are permanent and stories aren't. It's used to share "smaller" moments
- cambalache 6y ago99% of successful Instagram stories are hot girls doing things, anything.
- yurikoval 6y agoLooks like Microsoft PowerPoint got an upgrade
- tsjq 6y agoHow long before this gets killed by Google ?
- gdsdfe 6y agoI often forget that everything and anything that Google does is to sell ads
- anonygler 6y agoThis seems to be Google’s response to Apple News+. Nobody has faith in their ability to long haul things. Especially as niche as this.
- yalogin 6y agoWhat is this? Is this a substack + instagram mashup? Or an Apple news+ clone?
- sieabahlpark 6y agoWho wants to bet when this project is going to die? I suspect 2022
- gandutraveler 6y agoWhen I searched for few athletes on Google, I remember seeing a stories+AMA like feature. It looks like this has already in use for internal Google search products. It looks like a content publishing platform and Google crawler will aggregate these stories across the web to show the most trending stories on web. If executed well I do see this being successful. But it's Google, the team which developed is may very well be working on something else and this will most likely not get marketing budget and support needed to succeed.
- rosmax_1337 6y agoFuture todo: Check if this can be blocked via an ablocker or some kind of greasemonkey script. I wish google would just index the web. This is getting out of hand.
- quard 6y agoI'm making small startup about Stories: https://storista.io https://storista.io and my first impressions was "Oh, no", but when I realised that Google again using AMP. P.S. Feel free to ask about longer trial or discounts!
- klunger 6y agoAm I the only one that thinks this is kind of nice? I was just putting together a personal portfolio website and thinking about adding a feature like this. But I hadn't yet because of the work involved. This will make it a lot easier. If you don't like, you don't have to use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- messo 6y agoThe concept of Stories does not seem very complex to implement from a technical point of view. This makes me hope that someone feels inspired to make a open source Stories-project that can be self-hosted and integrated easily anywhere on the web – without AMP and Googles tracking tentacles built into it. Maybe make it part of the Fediverse? I know that Pixelfed has their own Instagram-inspired Stories functionality – ephemeral stories that disappear after 24h. What Google has built here seems to be a b2c-focused product.
- Hippocrates 6y agoI’m patiently awaiting McDonalds stories.
- znpy 6y agoSomebody at google is pushing for a huge salary bump and career boost, I guess. That looks like the perfect thing outside of google's core business that's going to be killed in like a year or something.