Ok, the elephant in the room....what the heck is AMP and why does it dominate every search result...

[denvercardonations]

Ok, the elephant in the room...what the heck is AMP and why does it dominate every search result for the political election coverage? It actually wasn't until a week or two ago when I would Google "Trump" to stay informed on whatever new war he was waging within the Republican party, that I noticed a news slider above everything else that looked like the Twitter and the G+ feeds below it, but I have not heard of it. I started doing some research, and rather than believe some random blog I want to ask and get the straight skinny from all of you, because one of the headlines read Here's what publishers need to know about Google's new plan to speed up your website. And of note is that this was being put into place to deliver content like Facebook Articles and Apple News.

Can anyone shed some light on this for me please, specifically does it worth for or against smaller websites? Is there anything I need to do so I am not left behind? Like how microdata was introduced years ago and I didn't look into it, and today I think, many years later, I was stupid to look past it. Any thoughts would be appreciated. [URLnf="http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/get-ampd-heres-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-googles-new-plan-to-speed-up-your-website/"]Here[/URLnf] is the article I am referencing, and here is a quote.

Google notes that AMP isnt a business partnership the way that Instant Articles or Apple News are; there’s no ad rev share to consider. But AMP tries to do something maybe even more significant: change the way that the web is built, killing off some technologies and advantaging others. In a world of controlled platforms and walled app gardens, the web is the last open space standing, built over two decades, and there’s something irksome about a few Google engineers deciding which parts to ban.

 

[RDO Servers]

Thats a new one on me, but it looks like AMP is a opensource code base for creating mobile content

[URLnf="https://www.ampproject.org/"]https://www.ampproject.org/[/URLnf]
[URLnf="http://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/"]http://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/[/URLnf]

 

[denvercardonations]

Another thing I found interesting or troubling with that article (which is very well-written and insightful) is this: In the earlier days of the web, browser manufacturers (most notably Microsoft) tried to shape HTML so that it would only work properly in its universe — the days of “Best Viewed In Internet Explorer.” The web standards movement worked very hard for years to get browsers and developers on board with using agreed-upon open standards for how the web gets built and rendered.

Now, AMP essentially asks you to build a parallel-universe version of your site that strips out not just anything that’s slow, but anything that might be slow. You know how ad blockers block all ads, whether they’re perfectly reasonable or aggressively terrible? AMP HTML kills all JavaScript, not just bad JavaScript.

Because, it seems they are doing this out of fear or to reaffirm control. I mean, to some degree I give Google a free pass when they try things. They weren't wrong dumping Google Video in favor of Youtube, I think Gmail was a personal project of one of their employees, and they always seemed very user focused despite needing to turn a dollar. It is open source from what I read, which adds a huge layer of transparency I suppose. One thing I noticed with AMP following Trumps decimation of the SUper Tuesday field, was that when you scroll through the articles that AMP delivers into its control container, I could never find a way to actually visit the original source, I could not backlink to it. I wanted to share a super funny news article in there about Christy during yesterday, but I could NOT find a backlink to submit to Reddit! Short train derail, here is the image that left me dying on the floor: