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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-not-the-cable-people dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

AMP - Google's collaborative project to speed up the loading time for mobile web pages — is getting an interesting acceleration of its own today. Relay Media, a company founded by an ex-Googler that had developed technology to help covert web pages to the AMP format, has been acquired by Google.

The company announced the news on its home page, to its customers (one of whom, Russell Heimlich, lead developer at Philly blog BillyPenn.com, tipped the news to us), and on its LinkedIn page. We have reached out to Google to get a statement and will update this post as we learn more.

For now, what we know is that it looks like Google may be closing down Relay Media as part of the deal but will continue to operate the service as the tech is transferred to Google's platform. New-publisher onboarding will be put on hold for the time being, it seems.

"We're excited to announce that Google has acquired Relay Media's AMP Converter technology," the company writes. "Service for current customers will continue uninterrupted as we transition the Relay Media AMP Converter to Google's infrastructure. We're pausing new publisher onboarding as we focus on the integration effort."

The note to existing users had only slightly more detail: some contact addresses for support and the indication that new AMP features would continue to be supported with Relay Media's converter for now, although also with a warning:

The rules for AMP are pretty close to what I learned when I first started working with HTML in the late 1990s. Why can't designers follow those rules without Google enforcing them? (Oh, right: Marketing departments that insist on three separate analytics sources. And designers who can't stay away from anything that ...

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/google-acquires-relay-media-for-its-amp-converting-tech-to-ramp-up-its-mobile-effort/

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages project)'s homepage, an example of basic markup, coverage at Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:41AM (10 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:41AM (#579721) Journal

    AMP is a solution in search of a problem. Just fix the damn web pages so that there are not hundreds of external objects pulled in from dozens of third party servers. Google is in a position to steer how people and their companies build their web sites by rewarding appropriate sites and punishing poor sites in the rankings. They already do that for several areas, why not for crap pages, too? Or are they going for a proprietary alternative to the web some day?

    If you want to see a real mess, just go to most any main stream web site, especially one infected with a lot of javascript. Then open a developer tools panel. That's usually done with ctrl-shift-i. From there choose "network" and reload the page. In most cases, you'll see dozens of calls for external objects, some from the same site, many from third party sites. Some pages hit triple digits. That's what needs to be fixed, not adding another protocol. Especially not adding a protocol which may be considered a step further away from the open Web.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:52AM (6 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:52AM (#579722) Journal
    But if web pages aren't all loading at least one thing from Google's servers, how would Google track what web pages people are visiting?
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    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:13PM (5 children)

      by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:13PM (#579742) Journal

      how would Google track what web pages people are visiting?

      Through Chrome telemetry, which is in browsers with a majority (over 50 percent) of usage share.

      • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:18AM (4 children)

        by Wootery (2341) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:18AM (#580341)

        Citation needed. As far as I know, Chrome doesn't spy on its users any more than any other browser.

        • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:41AM (3 children)

          by Pino P (4721) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:41AM (#580957) Journal

          Chrome history sync [google.com] allows Google to see what documents a logged-in Chrome user visits.

          • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:46AM (2 children)

            by Wootery (2341) on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:46AM (#581076)

            logged-in Chrome user

            Personally I've never logged in to Chrome, and I never will.

            If you log in to your browser, what are you expecting to happen? It's optional. What exactly do you think you're opting-in to if not cloud synchronisation features?

            • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:19PM (1 child)

              by Pino P (4721) on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:19PM (#581120) Journal

              I imagine that even if you don't sign in, enough other users do to make them a valid sample.

              • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:26PM

                by Wootery (2341) on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:26PM (#581138)

                Sample of what? How is that a problem to me, as someone who doesn't want to opt-in?

                In this instance, I really don't see Google as the bad guy. If you want to sign-in for cross-machine synchronisation, you can. If you don't want to, then use Chrome without signing-in. What's the problem?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by rob_on_earth on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:54PM

    by rob_on_earth (5485) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:54PM (#579779) Homepage

    A couple of years ago I ran fiddler to find out why a new site was loading so slow. Fiddler shows all the http traffic and requests/responses and is Windows only.

    In the results I found a single call to an ad agency, this then used HTTP status code 302 to bounce 12 times, through Yahoo twice, Google once and plethora of ad agencies I had never heard of. Turns out the ad was being bid on and only the best bidder would get to serve the ad. Neadless to say we dumped the ad company. Then had a word with devs about where to put script blocks so pages do not block.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:40PM (#579955)

    Just fix the damn web pages so that there are not hundreds of external objects pulled in from dozens of third party servers.

    SOB, you must be your own boss aren't you?

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:47AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:47AM (#580271) Homepage

    Google has been in a position to steer how people and their companies build their web sites for a long time now.

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