Facebook's turbo-charged Instant Articles: Another brick in the wall

The future newspapergeddon

When Facebook have made newspapers dependent on them, they will demand the newspapers stop publish articles on their own websites and only publish them on FB.

Cart before horse

How about giving the end user a choice? Google's search results could have a little performance indicator next to each result, to give you an idea of how long the page takes to load. Facebook could do the same: a lightning symbol to indicate fast-loading pages, a snail symbol to indicate slow pages.

Google already shows the words "mobile friendly" to indicate that the page isn't too small to read; something similar could tell us that the page takes forever to load. But who benefits? Follow the money: all those slow advertising scripts probably lead back to Google's revenue stream. Are they really going to bite the hand that feeds?

Looks to me like a server side ad-blocker...

.... aimed to get rid of someone else ads to ensure you get only fb or google ones...

Anyway the web forgot performance as soon as it was out of the CERN labs. When marketing offices noticed it, pages became a battlefield of useless contents.

I *hate* instant articles. When I'm interested in a link someone's posted, I want to use the browser and adblocker of *my* choice to view the site and not have someone else reformat it and target ads at me.

But who's going to use it?

The point of these "standards" such as they are - or even the CPP Specification - is to say "We wrote this page in a way devoid of annoying bloat"

...but the site owners are the ones including all that crud in the first place. They chose to do it - no one made them - and presumably they chose to do it because they have numbers that say that forcing flash ads and "Please sign up to our newsletter" popups actually _does_ increase site revenue.

To make them change, surely the first step is going to have to be to convince them otherwise, or else to the suits who sign off on the final site design, this is going to look like a deliberate attack on their revenue streams, and why on earth would they agree to that?

World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Platform Incubator Community Group

worst band name ever.

competing formats

"three competing formats for three competing publishing platforms ... It's also a lot of work for publishers who'd like to support all three."

As the format you need to create in all 3 cases is XML (RSS variant options) or HTML (Google AMP) not a huge amount of work - if you produce some intermediate XML friendly format then trivial to run transforms to create the appropriate output.

But far simpler to create lightweight pages in the 1st place, then no need to worry about 3 competing formats

Bah!

I wouldn't mind the pinit,arsebook,pop-ups and Google Analytics content if it would load and render in the background AFTER the worthwhile content has appeared.

As for best practices, has anyone at El Reg so much as looked at the eye-blinding ads that load into the banneron the Register App?

Talk about pot and kettle conversations.

I already used something similar

I used Readsy.co to read this article, thereby stripping all the superfluous stuff publishers like El Reg like to add... :)

Google AMP, though - in true Google fashion - AMP eschews existing standards like RSS or JSON in favor of re-inventing the wheel

Well, to be fair RSS is extremely limited and the extensions, such as the Yahoo media ones, are verbose because XML is verbose. JSON is poorly suited to rich media and would require transformation in any case. AMP is a subset of HTML which makes embedding in existing pages, such as a news preview, a doddle.

What about ads?

If they are tossing out the ads that's great for readers but why would the publishers be interested? Or does it allow some ads, just (hopefully) not the annoying types? Or does Facebook insert its own ads, and give the publisher a cut?

What they really need is a system that prevents the type of stupid "articles" that are basically showing you one picture and paragraph per page. I guess some people are willing to sit through that, but between the annoyance and how slowly they load I avoid those like the plague. I suppose they might suck less if each one loaded quickly, but I'd still probably avoid them.