Facebook's Instant Articles Platform To Support Google AMP, Apple News (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: One of the problems publishers face today in making their content more readable on mobile devices is that there are multiple, competing formats available for this purpose. Facebook has Instant Articles, Google is spearheading the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, and the Apple News Format optimizes content for iOS devices. Facebook is today taking a crack at a solution to this problem by rolling out support for both AMP and soon Apple News as a part of its open source Instant Articles software development kit. The updated SDK will now include an extension that lets publishers build content that's publishable in all three formats, beginning with support for Google's AMP in addition to Facebook's own Instant Articles. In the weeks ahead it will also include support for publishing to Apple News, though the company didn't provide an exact launch date for when that feature would be added.

Comments

Smartphone content in Web standards

[koavf]

Can someone explain this to me, since I am pretty ignorant about smartphones but *why* do these formats even exist? What is it that they do that can't be accomplished with HTML/CSS for rendering a page and RSS for syndication?

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

speed

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how HTML was designed to work anywhere? Well, that's not good. Imagine how much better it would be if each media company had its own specification.

Instead of just having a single HTML page for your article, you can now use Google HTML, Facebook HTML or Apple HTML.

Welcome to the future.

Captcha: Parasite.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing. It is less efficient.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

2.7 KB

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

People noticed that downloading tens of megabytes of ads and JavaScript surveillance code for every pageview was slowing things down on mobile devices, so they're optimizing the delivery mechanism for your comfort.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of Google/Doubleclick as a large blob of bacteria, eating the users of the websites that have their tracker scripts on them.

Except instead of eating, it's gathering datapoints and aggregating them into sellable profiles. This format, is optimized for that. Whenever you request a document in this format, it is not an external tracker script that tracks you, it's the protocol itself that is one big tracking script that incidentally also does something with presenting data or something, who cares.

Seeing as Gesichtbuch had adopted it so early, it must be pretty fucking awful.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

That is nonsense.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need for new formats to achieve that.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[thomn8r]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't have to be a "new format". I think the Google crap is a specification for web pages such that the web page must have inlined javascript and CSS. I don't know the rest but it might have some max size for advertisement, the web server must support HTTP/2 (a possible example), there should be this amount of calls to CDNs and they should be used for a couple pictures and backgrounds. I'm making shit up as I go since I don't want to read the spec.

And it can look "appified" with just the web, htlm5 and such. It's a simple matter of making some crappy design with flat this, flat that, icons we would have rejected in 1987, annoying ribbon and some "high tech" sans serif font and color scheme.

Re:Smartphone content in Web standards

[Anonymous Coward]

(replying to myself)

aw right, so AMP requires you to load some particular javascript from google. So if you read it or you publish for it you're fucked anyway.

It's some piece of shit to lock mainstream (or gullible/victim non mainstream) journalists into a google borg. Might easily be "Theresay May" compliant, just ask failbook news, boggle news or crapple news for a nice digest how who read what.

Centralized control of the news...

[Anonymous Coward]

All through facebook who will, of course, revoke your app id if you say something they dislike.

Funny how it was all the rage about corporitization and control of the media to influence opinion just a few short years ago and now Facebook has now completely monopolized it.

Do it!

[DogDude]

Yes! You can give away all of your personal information to Apple, Google, and Facebook AT THE SAME TIME. This is unprecedented. The stupid should be ecstatic over this.

Re:Do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

These are just formats/certifications/requirements to ensure a webpage will render quickly on mobile devices with bad connections.

But that's cool: don't let that get in the way of your FUD.

Misread that as "Cisco AMP"

[billstewart]

Cisco Advanced Malware Protection is their "hash transmitted/received files, compare with hashes of known malware" which has its own uses in this sort of environment.

That's true

[Sarah Bishop]

Reading news through social network and the web is becoming popular, so publishers should find the solution to their news easy to read and update faster. 192.168 1.1

Re:That's true

[Ronyonte]

But it becomes more difficult to find the one you really need from kinds of articles.

That's too bad

[Rujiel]

... because Google AMP fucking sucks for everyone, and is just an ad revenue scheme on google's part.

Re:That's too bad

[reboot246]

Just one more reason to hate Facebook.
And Google.
And Apple.

Obligatory XKCD

[knorthern knight]

Apple and Google have competing standards? We can't have that.

https://xkcd.com/927/

WHO IS SETH RICH?

[Anonymous Coward]

WHO IS SETH RICH?

A CALL TO ACTION: "THEY" HAVE COMPLETELY LOST CONTROL OF THE SETH RICH MURDER COVERUP. HERE IS HOW YOU BLOW IT COMPLETELY OPEN:

Write "Who killed Seth Rich" and / or "Who is Seth Rich" neatly on every piece of U.S. currency you get your hands on, neatly, in indelible ink, preferably with a fine point sharpie that does not draw thick. Spend the cash as usual. Anyone who ends up with that cash will be hit with that question, and is likely to become interested in finding out what happened (if they don't already know)

The MSM can claim it is a hoax all they want, and they will still lose. They can't win this, it is GAME OVER for them. With the internet getting censored, and the media full of lies, this is how we do it.

Obviously Google is going to kick in the manipulation, to drive people to an approved answer to that question. So you can additionally kill this by writing "google sethrichdoc.jpg". The photo I put on my site has been picked up everywhere and is the top hit on Google even though Google won't show you this site as the source. That will explain it ALL while the MSM lies, and google spews for officialdom.

Re:WHO IS SETH RICH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I see the crazies have moved on from Pizzagate, then.

Paid shills

[Rujiel]

I think shills are on overtime trying to make anyone who mentions seth rich seem crazy. Maybe their bosses finally figured out that getting smart people to hate assange / manning / snowden / greenwald isn't going to work.