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 ...
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages project)'s homepage, an example of basic markup, coverage at Wikipedia.
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Google promises publishers an alternative to AMP
Google's AMP project is not uncontroversial. Users often love it because it makes mobile sites load almost instantly. Publishers often hate it because they feel like they are giving Google too much control in return for better placement on its search pages. Now Google proposes to bring some of the lessons it learned from AMP to the web as a whole. Ideally, this means that users will profit from Google's efforts and see faster non-AMP sites across the web (and not just in their search engines).
Publishers, however, will once again have to adopt a whole new set of standards for their sites, but with this, Google is also giving them a new path to be included in the increasingly important Top Stories carousel on its mobile search results pages.
"Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel," AMP tech lead Malte Ubl writes today. "This content will need to follow a set of future web standards and meet a set of objective performance and user experience criteria to be eligible."
Also at Search Engine Land and The Verge.
Related: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
Google may be relinquishing control of its controversial Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project:
The project has been led by Malte Ubl, a senior staff engineer working on Google's Javascript infrastructure projects, who has until now held effective unilateral control over the project.
In the wake of all of this criticism, the AMP project announced today that it would reform its governance, replacing Ubl as the exclusive tech lead with a technical steering committee comprised of companies invested in the success in the project. Notably, the project's intention has an "...end goal of not having any company sit on more than a third of the seats." In addition, the project will create an advisory board and working groups to shepherd the project's work.
The project is also expected to move to a foundation in the future. These days, there are a number of places such a project could potentially reside, including the Apache Software Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation.
The AMP Contributor Summit 2018 will take place at Google in Mountain View, California on September 25 and 26, 2018.
Previously: Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web
Google Acquires Relay Media to Convert Ordinary Web Pages to AMP Pages
Google Bringing Accelerated Mobile Pages to Email
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Google AMP Can Go To Hell
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Tuesday October 10 2017, @09:49AM (1 child)
Oh hey, let's reinvent WAP [wikipedia.org] because (marketing|c-level|someone) thinks multi-meg pages are useful and usable.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:00PM
Backflip the M back over the A and
AMP >>> MAP. >>> WAP
Voila what is old is new again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:41AM (10 children)
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.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:52AM (6 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday October 10 2017, @12:13PM (5 children)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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
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
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
SOB, you must be your own boss aren't you?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:47AM
Google has been in a position to steer how people and their companies build their web sites for a long time now.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by corey on Tuesday October 10 2017, @10:27PM
Company started by an ex-Google employee is now being bought by Google. Sounds fishy to me.