The race to provide unflinching online reading experience is on. Barely days after Facebook announced a plan to load Facebook pages faster for the mobile users, Google has come out with a parallel strategy today.
Titled as the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, it will help make online reading experience, especially news articles a pleasurable experience. The Alphabet subsidiary has unveiled the idea, according to which web pages will load much faster. The publishers have to work alongside AMP, and adhere to the technical specifications it has devised. The project will also provide an option to assist the articles from Google’s cache.
The news about the project broke out a few days ago and it was speculated that Google had joined hands with Twitter to work on an open source project that focused on developing mobile articles that load fairly quick. Twitter’s collaboration with Google was seen as a counter measure to Facebook’s Instant Articles.
Google’s head of news Richard Gingras stated that the project ensures that the World Wide Web does not turn into World Wide Wait.
Currently Google adapts the web pages to mobile devices by restricting large files, and loading primarily content for the mobile devices. This works when users are browsing through low-bandwidth connection. But, with AMP web pages are optimized to load instantly for the mobile devices.
Google has clarified that AMP optimized pages won’t be available starting today, but a preview for developers has been launched through GitHub repository for the open source code.
Once the AMP is launched for general users, publishers can utilize the service even if they don’t have a working relationship with Google.
AMP will also help generate revenue for Google as its optimized pages won’t shy away from displaying ads. However, Google wants to put a check onto the type of ads publishers display on their pages, but this novel idea doesn’t appear to materialise into practicality.
Twitter on the other hand is like going to reap substantial rewards from AMP, as the pages will support embedded tweets and Vines.
Twitter Product Manager Michael Ducker said –
For now, AMP links will open just like any other link in Twitter’s apps. We are really excited about the experience of using these links.
