Am I the only one who, after reading the landing page, still has no idea what this is? I’ve been watching “immersive” websites for quite some time, mostly marketing-ish websites but also sometimes some special purpose pages from National Geografic or NYT.
What exactly is this? A JavaScript/CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?
I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.
This is literally AMP [1]. The feature was launched as AMP Stories, which has now been rebranded to Web Stories. They are throwing everything at the wall to increase the use of AMP.
It’s pretty cool. If you make a url return data that is visually aligned with “a story protocol” google will put it at top of relevant search results.
Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.
Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.
I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.
> Web Stories are a web-based version of the popular “Stories” format that blend video, audio, images, animation and text to create a dynamic, less formal consumption experience that goes beyond a simple play button. This visual format lets you explore content at your own pace by tapping through it, or swiping from one piece of content to the next.
It looks like a format to let Google put small web pages with mixed media into search carousels.
This is one of the more humorous threads I've read in awhile. Instagram stories are among the most widely used social media features, and it seems like the majority of commenters here are completely unfamiliar with the format.
Basically mobile-first tappable web pages. Design-wise it's distinct from most web links as they require you to scroll to read. Here you just tap through pages, like you would on an ebook.
Completely agree with this sentiment. Dug slightly deeper and founds this. Stories are part of APM, adding the ability to create the 'stories' pages by conforming to Google's format like including a link to their stories JavaScript.
I clicked the learn section after, like what you said, learning nothing from the landing page.
After reading through the learn section, it looks like a clone of facebook or instagram's story feature or whatever that will appear on google search results.
At least from the info they've provided.
I've always disliked those...it's the one thing on facebook that shows the other person who looks at it at when. Something I've always been secretly terrified facebook does with everything.
I think they are just trying to make it easy to make a story-like webpage (as you mentioned nat geo or NYT do this at times). However someone with no web experience who just wants to tell a story can't make a complicated site like that.
So, it seems like this is just a tool to assist with that.
Which is interesting.. however their landing page sure doesn't make it at all clear as to what is going on.
It feels like instagram/facebook-like stories, but searchable on the web. These interactive stories definitely work great as advertisements on Facebook and now Google wants to monetize from them too.
I think they are taking Snap's stories and atomizing it so that they can be placed anywhere on the web. Then they are monetizing it by putting ads over it.
At first I thought it was a feature for webmasters to add “stories” or “cards” within the search results. Then I guessed it is a web publishing platform. No idea yet!
Based on the description, I think it's like a web page, but you host it yourself, can embed media, link to other web pages, and it can be found using Google.
Wow, I guess this is what FOMO looks like when taken to the b2c megacorp level.
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.
An interesting hot take I read a while back (that I can't find) was that Google's strategy is generally "compete with every company on every product in order to build a moat, so that no one can touch search, which is the actual castle." And if you think about it makes a lot of sense -- Google competes with almost every other tech company on something, but no one competes with Google on search. The exception, perhaps, is voice search where Alexa / Siri are truly competitive.
The non-cynical take is that "stories" is the first content format since the "feed" that is really sticky and opens a new avenue for user interaction. Everyone is adopting them because is now clear that it's not a fad.
Consumers understand the concept of stories and actually engage heavily with them so nobody wants to miss out.
Of course not all the implementations are good or useful, but from a user interaction perspective the functionality is becoming so widely familiar that it makes sense why everyone is adopting this format.
> It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it’ll fail just as badly.
It feels a lot more like it is AMP all over again (because it is literally AMP). And I don’t recall that failing.
AMP is the Google thing it is trendy to complain about taking over, as opposed to almost everything else, where it is trendy to complain about it imminently failing.
When I see things like this I laugh and laugh and laugh about the naive view usually presented in HN that the "best minds of our generation" are all in FAANGs. Move over Peter Scholze, Terry Tao and Magnus Carlsen, the Google(TM) kids who just copied TikTok/Instagram have just arrived.
Ah geez, I really don’t want to derail this, but Magnus Carlsen is not one of the “best minds of our generation”, he’s remarkably good at a game that rewards memory and pattern matching.
I don’t think even Magnus Carlsen thinks of himself in that way, no one in the chess world does, as far as I know.
Most serious chess players don’t make the mistake of thinking their skills translate very well.
Part of AMP (1) is a web component library grounded in the extensible web manifesto (2).
The plan was that the browser vendors give developers deeper access so that they could test new elements/standards through web components and polyfills.
The AMP component library is one example of this, and stories are one of their forms. So basically if you use their tags to structure your content, it creates a ig/sc style Web Story.
The structure that they have is (3):
Story -> Pages -> Layers -> Elements
Each page represents a tappable screen,
Layers occupy the full screen, stack and have layout defaults like fill or lower-third and
Elements can be regular html elements or other AMP components.
Looks interesting, seems like an AMP like format (or AMP extension? Unclear.) for publishing stories that can be picked up by other platforms (likely at this point only google). I realize people hate AMP, but this seems like a strictly better alternative than a closed platform like snapchat, instagram, etc., present.
I think the comments about how this is yet another google wave/orkut/+, etc., are kind of missing what this is (probably because of bad branding overlap with Snapchat/Instagram stories).
I think this is a content marketing and blogging platform for small startups, "influencers", and the like. Think of NomadList, Thrillist, food review websites, blogs, etc.
That doesn't mean that this will be very successful, obviously, but I don't see an individual person making much use of this. Seems like a fine thing for a startup to do, Google will probably not get enough out of this to keep it alive.
I'm actually planning to use this to create a web version of the music zines I post on Instagram. I used to create them using the Swiper slider library, but you have to build the entire HTML+CSS structure yourself, which is very time consuming. Something GUI-based and mobile-specific will greatly increase the speed of production.
The Google app on my iPhone enabled this a few weeks ago (The home section shows news below the search bar.)
The UX was extremely confusing as there was no scrolling, swiping changed stories, and tapping went to the next page. The content was 90% image and 10% text and was extremely annoying to read.
It was also inconsistent from other content, as unlike the other "non-story" items, I could not change preferences (ie ignore the content from a site or ignore the topic). The same set of stories showed up for a week before I just turned the whole feature off.
I have no doubt pretty soon these stories will be in a carousel at the top of google.com search results, just like featured snippets. And like AMP, this will bring you higher in the search results, so everyone will be making these.
Another way to keep people on Google instead instead of proceeding to the host website...
(It looks like they already do this in their mobile app)
After scrolling for what felt like forever... I finally got down to:
"It’s amazing what you can do with a story.
Web Stories can take many forms. The best-in-class examples below provide just a taste of what’s possible in this engaging format."
They have a bunch of examples, so I watched several, hoping to understand how this thing works, and why it's as good as they say. I guess it's a clone of Facebook stories? You somehow piece together a bunch of REALLY short videos or images, and then it makes a little movie. The best-in-class examples were hard to watch, and I can see no reason why I'd ever prefer this format over anything else. Ever. I reallllly don't get why they did this or why anyone would use it.
But I also think this one will be killed in a few years. A big point with stories is to have you publish them to the friends _who care_ in a network. A social network.
A user googling to get to a website isn't the same kind of user. That's not the user who wants to engage with you on a more personal level: that user would instead befriend you on Instagram. The googling user is likely rather after information, contact details or the like.
So I think Google will be a victim of the "distanced" users of theirs here. Google has users googling things with a purpose, whether it's a recipe, a review or to shop things. They aren't looking for feeds there -- they already have (too?) many ways to get that. They want distilled information. You know, what Google's search engine is designed to get. What they built their brand on: finding information fast.
I think people are moving away from the "generic web" to engage on a personal level, not towards it, because a smartphone's social network app is more intimate. But sure, if the price is right, I guess some might adopt this, if not only as sort of a SEO tool. But I think the value as a product won't even be on the same chart as what stories provide social networks.
Personally, I think stories are a terrible format to engage with users in the way Google aims for here, actually trying to take this format seriously and not just memes and simple ad hoc stuff. Just look at VICE's example here: https://www.vice.com/stories/inside-my-mind-oliver-tree/ What in heaven's name? Multiple clicks about god knows what just to finally get more of it in my mail?
As a user, what I really want is just high-quality information. No click-bait headlines, auto-play movies, or hijacking standard browser scrolling. Images are fine if they actually help to convey useful information, but beyond that less is more. I'd also prefer to see less opinion-based content out of Google News and more factual reporting... and a lot of times I feel like these "story" type articles tend to cherry-pick the facts to fit into whatever narrative they are trying to tell.
I understand that other people might have different preferences, and I'm sure Google has a bunch of data that proves this stuff improves click-through rates and engagement. But I have been checking Google News several times a day out of habit for years now, and I think it's time to break that habit. Much better I think to just frequent a small number of high-quality sources than to try to drink from the firehose of crap on Google News.
[+] [-] stingraycharles|5 years ago|reply
What exactly is this? A JavaScript/CSS framework? Something like AMP? Or is it a social network like Snapchat?
I’m genuinely confused what I’m looking at and feel old right now.
[+] [-] dessant|5 years ago|reply
This is literally AMP [1]. The feature was launched as AMP Stories, which has now been rebranded to Web Stories. They are throwing everything at the wall to increase the use of AMP.
[1] https://amp.dev/about/stories/
[+] [-] sktrdie|5 years ago|reply
Think of it as a mini-html site that follows a specific set of visual JS and CSS protocols so that consumers have guarantee of its behavior (will not have crazy ads, gifs or third party content) and behaves consistently.
Kind of interesting avenue for publishing content on the web that isn’t tied to any specific platform.
I’d even go further and say the web needs more of these kind of things. All websites behave differently. Maybe we need a visual protocol also for general web apps (just like this web stories) so that we have consistent behavior. I dare to call this protocol Web Apps.
[+] [-] wisty|5 years ago|reply
> Web Stories are a web-based version of the popular “Stories” format that blend video, audio, images, animation and text to create a dynamic, less formal consumption experience that goes beyond a simple play button. This visual format lets you explore content at your own pace by tapping through it, or swiping from one piece of content to the next.
It looks like a format to let Google put small web pages with mixed media into search carousels.
[+] [-] nvrspyx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoopertrooper|5 years ago|reply
It seems like a framework for creating short vertical-orientated chaptered videos with fancy captions and that play mute by default.
Why anyone would want this? I do not know.
https://stories.google/showcase/
[+] [-] sanderjd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|5 years ago|reply
Basically mobile-first tappable web pages. Design-wise it's distinct from most web links as they require you to scroll to read. Here you just tap through pages, like you would on an ebook.
[+] [-] janaagaard|5 years ago|reply
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
“Like AMP”? Well, if you follow the links to get to the dev docs, you land at:
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
So, yeah, it is very much like AMP.
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
After reading through the learn section, it looks like a clone of facebook or instagram's story feature or whatever that will appear on google search results.
At least from the info they've provided.
I've always disliked those...it's the one thing on facebook that shows the other person who looks at it at when. Something I've always been secretly terrified facebook does with everything.
[+] [-] mrlala|5 years ago|reply
So, it seems like this is just a tool to assist with that.
Which is interesting.. however their landing page sure doesn't make it at all clear as to what is going on.
[+] [-] technaturerun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chicob|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babesh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ativzzz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bromuro|5 years ago|reply
I came here to read comments about more details.
[+] [-] anoncake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k3liutZu|5 years ago|reply
Another "social" attempt from Google.
Anyone remember Google+?
[+] [-] hodgesrm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ezconnect|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenpetryk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrollaway|5 years ago|reply
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.
[+] [-] bmmayer1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoisjuan|5 years ago|reply
Of course not all the implementations are good or useful, but from a user interaction perspective the functionality is becoming so widely familiar that it makes sense why everyone is adopting this format.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
It feels a lot more like it is AMP all over again (because it is literally AMP). And I don’t recall that failing.
AMP is the Google thing it is trendy to complain about taking over, as opposed to almost everything else, where it is trendy to complain about it imminently failing.
[+] [-] mdgrech23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cambalache|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kace91|5 years ago|reply
If you hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design your bathroom, you can't use the fact that you end up looking at a toilet as proof that he's not great.
[+] [-] TameAntelope|5 years ago|reply
I don’t think even Magnus Carlsen thinks of himself in that way, no one in the chess world does, as far as I know.
Most serious chess players don’t make the mistake of thinking their skills translate very well.
[+] [-] SingAlong|5 years ago|reply
* https://nowthisnews.com/stories/paralympic-swimmer-builds-ma...
* https://www.lonelyplanet.com/stories/5-destinations-to-see-w...
What I don't see:
* I visited the home pages of those sites. I'm not sure how to open up stories if I were an internet user just passing by.
* I don't see a way to exit the stories experience other than clicking a link/article
* How to open a story from any web page on a desktop (It is called "Web Stories" so I assumed a few things)
This seems to be build on top of AMP:
* https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
* https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/integrate...
[+] [-] Arkdy|5 years ago|reply
The plan was that the browser vendors give developers deeper access so that they could test new elements/standards through web components and polyfills.
The AMP component library is one example of this, and stories are one of their forms. So basically if you use their tags to structure your content, it creates a ig/sc style Web Story.
The structure that they have is (3): Story -> Pages -> Layers -> Elements
Each page represents a tappable screen, Layers occupy the full screen, stack and have layout defaults like fill or lower-third and Elements can be regular html elements or other AMP components.
I think that it's a neat way of organizing pages of information and made a clojure wrapper around it here: https://github.com/rainbow-bamboo/sargam
1. https://amp.dev/about/mission-and-vision/ 2. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto/blob/master/READM... 3. https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
[+] [-] foota|5 years ago|reply
Edit: here's the technical documentation, https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
[+] [-] singhrac|5 years ago|reply
I think this is a content marketing and blogging platform for small startups, "influencers", and the like. Think of NomadList, Thrillist, food review websites, blogs, etc.
That doesn't mean that this will be very successful, obviously, but I don't see an individual person making much use of this. Seems like a fine thing for a startup to do, Google will probably not get enough out of this to keep it alive.
[+] [-] rchaud|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peanut_worm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turtlebits|5 years ago|reply
The UX was extremely confusing as there was no scrolling, swiping changed stories, and tapping went to the next page. The content was 90% image and 10% text and was extremely annoying to read.
It was also inconsistent from other content, as unlike the other "non-story" items, I could not change preferences (ie ignore the content from a site or ignore the topic). The same set of stories showed up for a week before I just turned the whole feature off.
[+] [-] ra7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ceezy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtsiskin|5 years ago|reply
(It looks like they already do this in their mobile app)
[+] [-] rosmax_1337|5 years ago|reply
I wish google would just index the web. This is getting out of hand.
[+] [-] blakesterz|5 years ago|reply
"It’s amazing what you can do with a story. Web Stories can take many forms. The best-in-class examples below provide just a taste of what’s possible in this engaging format."
They have a bunch of examples, so I watched several, hoping to understand how this thing works, and why it's as good as they say. I guess it's a clone of Facebook stories? You somehow piece together a bunch of REALLY short videos or images, and then it makes a little movie. The best-in-class examples were hard to watch, and I can see no reason why I'd ever prefer this format over anything else. Ever. I reallllly don't get why they did this or why anyone would use it.
[+] [-] slowkow|5 years ago|reply
https://killedbygoogle.com/
[+] [-] hedora|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Omnus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jug|5 years ago|reply
But I also think this one will be killed in a few years. A big point with stories is to have you publish them to the friends _who care_ in a network. A social network.
A user googling to get to a website isn't the same kind of user. That's not the user who wants to engage with you on a more personal level: that user would instead befriend you on Instagram. The googling user is likely rather after information, contact details or the like.
So I think Google will be a victim of the "distanced" users of theirs here. Google has users googling things with a purpose, whether it's a recipe, a review or to shop things. They aren't looking for feeds there -- they already have (too?) many ways to get that. They want distilled information. You know, what Google's search engine is designed to get. What they built their brand on: finding information fast.
I think people are moving away from the "generic web" to engage on a personal level, not towards it, because a smartphone's social network app is more intimate. But sure, if the price is right, I guess some might adopt this, if not only as sort of a SEO tool. But I think the value as a product won't even be on the same chart as what stories provide social networks.
Personally, I think stories are a terrible format to engage with users in the way Google aims for here, actually trying to take this format seriously and not just memes and simple ad hoc stuff. Just look at VICE's example here: https://www.vice.com/stories/inside-my-mind-oliver-tree/ What in heaven's name? Multiple clicks about god knows what just to finally get more of it in my mail?
[+] [-] davidw|5 years ago|reply
Well, at least until the product doesn't gain much traction and Google kills it.
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freetime2|5 years ago|reply
I understand that other people might have different preferences, and I'm sure Google has a bunch of data that proves this stuff improves click-through rates and engagement. But I have been checking Google News several times a day out of habit for years now, and I think it's time to break that habit. Much better I think to just frequent a small number of high-quality sources than to try to drink from the firehose of crap on Google News.