Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short. AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this project come from Google employees, and it was initiated by Google. So let’s be real: AMP is a Google project.
Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.
And due to the popularity of mobile search compared to desktop search, visibility in Google’s mobile search results is a must for publishers that want to survive in this era of diminishing revenue and fierce online competition for eyeballs.
If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.
So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.
And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.
AMP is also purported to throw in an 8-second delay to punish those that do not toe the line.
Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web (2017)
(Score: 1) by NateMich on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:09PM (5 children)
He actually suggests I should buy an iPhone because he sucks at web development?
Sure dude, I'll make your fucking problems into my fucking problems.
No thanks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
That would straw dog the guy as a stereotypical left winger; I looked his twitter feed over; actual observations are not so clear.
The dude blogs exclusively about SEO, and the "other" famous article of his, is, in some ways, more interesting than the linked one.
https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-news-bias-in-google-algorithm/ [polemicdigital.com]
An attempt at summarizing that article is 46% of clickbait providers clickbait traffic comes from the Google "top stories" carousel and only 2% from news.google.com and other places. The article summarized that google themselves admit the carousel is corrupt as hell and is essentially curated propaganda, so arguing over whats "right and wrong" is almost orthogonal to the entire business model.
Googles position seems to be something like "we'll advertise the hell out of select propaganda of yours for free IF and only IF you'll cooperate by producing propaganda we like and various technical reqs" and the usual characters being given wealth on a silver platter whine about it being too much work for them.
Maybe a good analogy of the whole argument is who should do how much work for who, with respect to supermarkets checkout lanes having copies of "weekly world news" physical clickbait for sale.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:50PM
Oh just thought of a better analogy. The whole fight is like a gangster movie where they're talking about the morality and ethics inside the business of selling heroin to kids or sex trafficking. People are kind of interested in the internal operations of organized crime very "Sopranos"-like. But its not like any level of morality and ethics in the complicated process of paying laundered protection money somehow makes the overall corrupt industry less corrupt. What are the moral and ethical issues of a whore withholding some amount of tips from her pimp, in the context of the greater sex trafficking industry as a whole, and does it really matter outside their personal transaction? Or what does it mean to be the most ethical pimp on the block?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday September 08 2018, @11:51PM (2 children)
Well, technically, he only says to ditch your Android phone. You could use a flip phone, or use landlines only, and comply with his suggestion.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:51AM (1 child)
Say someone wants to use a service that mediates arranging transportation between points, or at times, that are not served by a particular city's public transit. A user of an iPhone or Android phone would use Uber or Lyft. What would a user of a flip phone or land line use instead?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday September 10 2018, @01:12PM
Need a ride? Dial 555-TAXI