GOOGLE unveiled last week its answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles: Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP. According to the announcement of the project, AMP is a result of months of talk between publishers and tech companies “about the need to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone—publishers, consumer platforms, creators, and users.”
“We know that the web can be fast if best practices are followed,” the AMP website said. “To make the web fast at scale, we want to make it easier to create documents that are fast-by-default.”
Their answer is a system built on a sub-set of HTML or hypertext markup language—the underlying code of web pages. AMP HTML is built on “existing web technologies,” the project site said. The specifications have been published on Github, a service that encourages people to share code and work on projects.
The people behind AMP trumpet its open source nature and rightly so. Shortly after the announcement, WordPress released a plugin, which is still being actively developed in an open source manner, which enables AMP support upon activation. It’s an install-and-forget-about-it affair. The plugin creates and AMP version of a page that is accessible via a special URL with a trailing /amp/. The plugin also adds the required meta information in the original document to point to the AMP version.
The AMP document does load up faster. The speed gain is substantial based on the limited test of sites that I run. The people behind the project described AMP HTML as “pretty fast.”
“In a sample of pages our early partners created we are seeing performance improvements measured through Speed Index between 15 percent and 85 percent,” it said in the site.
Speed is just one major aspect of AMP. Google promises “a new approach to caching that allows the publisher to continue to host their content while allowing for efficient distribution through Google’s high performance global cache.” In its announcement, the official Google blog said the tech titan will “open our cache servers to be used by anyone free of charge.”
In discussions and articles about AMP, several contrasted its open nature with the “proprietary” character of Facebook’s Instant Article. That is an oversimplification. Instant Article, according to several articles, seems to be built on RSS, which is also an open standard for distribution of articles. It is a mechanism for the social network to suck content into its own subset of the Internet, a walled garden where people are increasingly spending more of their time in, especially on mobile.
The core difference is that AMP is open in a sense that anyone can implement it right away. Instant Articles, on the other hand, requires that you enter into a partnership with Facebook, which also comes with ad revenue sharing.
As an independent publisher and blogger, I embrace AMP as a way to enhance readership and distribution on mobile. As someone who spends a lot of time on mobile, projects like AMP enhance reading on the small screen along with efforts like Reader View on mobile browsers.
Will publishers adopt AMP? Its open nature simplifies implementation and with many publishers using open source content management systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla to run their sites, implementation will be trivial.
(max@limpag.com)