Social networks are all morphing into the next phase of social media revolution where they are all becoming legit media houses and have put into place tools that are geared to woo publishers and traditional media alike to their platforms. One of the ways they are morphing is by making it easy for users to read articles instantly like Facebook’s Instant Articles. Google has today unveiled Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), their open source project that is aimed to make the reading experience on mobile better.
Just like Instant Articles, Accelerated Mobile Pages aim to load webpages from publishers instantaneously eliminating the need to wait for a webpage to load. For web developers, Google uses AMP HTML, a framework they say “that is built entirely out of existing web technologies which allows websites to build light-weight web pages”.
There is a demo only available on mobile that shows Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages in Search at work. The tech giant has partnered with a limited number of publishers and the actual demo is accessible by clicking g.co/ampdemo in your browser and search for specific keywords like Mars,Syria or fashion. You are then presented with a carousel where you can choose to read articles on the specific keyword. As you can see above, the content is presented in a magazine layout which makes it fun to read and it is quite refreshing to load an article without load time.
This move by Google solidifies the rumour that it was working with Twitter to launch a platform that looks like Facebook Instant Articles. Currently, you can be able to see tweets as part of search results thanks to their partnership and Twitter is among the tech companies that are in collaboration with Google in this Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
Google is also working with 30 other publishers and the tech companies include WordPress, Pinterest and LinkedIn which means web pages as instantaneous articles is now the current and you will be sure to see more of them in the future. Facebook on the other hand has a problem in its hand in that it now has to work harder to rollout its Instant articles worldwide and to woo more publishers to use it instead of the AMP.
