Google search introduces AMP Snapchat-style Story format,Google’s AMP for emails will change the way people interact on Gmail , II Google search introduces AMP stories format to take on Facebook, Snapchat; feature to be available for Gmail as well

Google has announced Gmail AMP pages, which could allow for more interactive features inside the email app, website itself. (Source: IE)

 

The search engine giant, Google on Wednesday, launched its own ‘stories’ format in order to compete against social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. With this new feature, Google will offer image-driven news articles aimed at mobile phone and tablet users. According to the details provided by Google, the content initially comes from outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, Conde Nast, Wired, and US People magazine and is designed to load much faster on mobile devices than conventional articles and videos.
“On mobile devices, users browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth,” said Rudy Galfi, who is heading the drive at Google. He added that images, videos and graphics help get readers’ attention as quickly as possible and keep them engaged through immersive and easily consumable visual information. Providing further details on how to use this feature, Rudy said that users can tap on the home screen to read further or simply swipe to the next article.
Google claims the format, which it is opening up to software developers, gives “novel ways to tell immersive stories” without the “prohibitively high start-up costs, particularly for small publishers”. “AMP stories aim to make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective,” Google said.
This new format is expected to give more editorial freedom to content creators. Other platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and particularly Facebook have all heavily used their own stories formats for full-screen displays of content.
The format will also be available for Gmail. With Gmail on AMP, developers can create newer, more interactive and actionable email experiences, says the company. New tasks can be completed inside email, claims Google, which means users will not have to leave the Gmail app or website for some of these interactions.
The information about this was provided by Google through a blog post. “AMP for Email will also make it possible for information to easily kept up-to-date, so emails never get stale and the content is accurate when a user looks at it,” this post read.
Google wants to change that and make emails more interactive by extending the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support to email clients. The company is planning to incorporate it in Gmail sometime in 2018 and has released the developer preview of AMP for emails on GitHub, a leading software development platform, to let developers play around with it.
Introduced in 2015 for webpages, AMP is an open source format which allows developers to create a data friendly alternative to standard webpages. It is also more flexible, allowing publishers and developers to present their content differently.
Google claims webpages based on AMP load faster and use 10 times less data, as it doesn’t allow extension to slow down page rendering. AMP for web browser has been a huge hit among social media sites, publishing houses, advertisers and e-commerce sites. Baidu, New York Times, US Xpress and Twitter are some of the early adopters of AMP for webpages.
AMP in emails will allow developers to embed AMP pages inside the email body. This will allow users to access many features within the email, so they won’t have to go to the parent website, in case they need more details. Also, the emails will load faster. For example, an email from Pinterest will let users browse through photos, find more details on them and save the favourite ones without leaving the email page. Similarly, users will be able to browse through hotel rooms, new offers and compare prices on Booking.com within an email.
A lot of phishing attacks have been carried out through emails. To protect users, Google has assured that it will allow a conservative subset of AMP functionality and will use a new AMP-HTML email validation spec. This means AMPs in emails won’t ask users to share any personal data on them. So an AMP email sent by a travel booking website will only allow users to browse through the features, while for booking and payment they will have to go to the webpage.
Google is also testing a new feature called AMP Stories on Google Search app. Inspired by Snapchat Stories feature, this new tool will allow publishers to present their stories in the form of slideshows involving GIFs and full page photos. Users can browse through the stories by tapping or swiping on the screen.
AMP Stories as they are called will allow publishers to create visually-rich, vertical-format stories to drive content discovery on mobile.
There is no dearth of ‘inspiration’ in the world of tech. Stories, a format pioneered by Snapchat, has literally been cloned by the who’s who of social media — Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. Now, Google too wants a slice of these mobile-friendly Stories.
Google has rolled out ‘AMP Stories’ for content publishers, which allows them to use images, videos, graphics and text to throw up vertical, swipeable search results on mobile. The search giant announced on its developers’ blog that the new feature has been piloted with leading content publishers viz. Condé Nast, Vox Media, Time Warner, Meredith Corp, Mashable, The Washington Post and more.

Image: Google

Immersive content has become the bone of contention on digital platforms. Given the reducing attention span of users and the explosion in content availability, it is imperative for publishers to indulge in eyeball-grabbing offerings. Google says AMP Stories is a platform to do just that.

 

Rudy Galfi, Product Manager for AMP at Google, said, “AMP Stories provide content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories. On mobile devices, users browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth. Images, videos and graphics help publishers to get their readers' attention as quickly as possible and keep them engaged through immersive and easily consumable visual information.”

The feature has been developed in consultation and collaboration with these top content publishers. Galfi said, “Publishers involved in the early development of the AMP stories format have brought together their reporters, illustrators, designers, producers, and video editors to creatively use this format and experiment with novel ways to tell immersive stories for a diverse set of content categories.”

Image: Google

Google will soon release the feature to other publishers. At present, AMP Stories do not support advertising, which could be a turn off for some publishers looking to monetise every piece of content they create. But, Google says ads will soon be supported.
That makes it similar to Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories. But, AMP Stories would be meaningful, professionally developed content as opposed to Snapchat’s and Instagram’s user-generated content.

Making AMP feature-rich

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, are, essentially, optimised web pages displayed on smartphones via Google search results. These load fast, as the name suggests, and are tailored for low-data networks.

 

While AMP surely enhances consumption and drives traffic, it has often been criticised for diluting the reader/viewer experience. Often times, images, graphics and videos do not load properly on AMP pages. Mobile advertisers have indicated that they lose per page ad revenues as a result of this.
AMP Stories builds on the existing AMP code. Like any web page, publishers can host an AMP story HTML page on their site and link to it from any other part of the site to drive discovery. Google has also released a tutorial on how to create AMP Stories.
“AMP Stories aim to make the production of stories as easy as possible from a technical perspective. The format comes with preset but flexible layout templates, standardised UI controls, and components for sharing and adding follow-on content,” it said.