Google Stories
stories.google
stories.google
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.
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.
At least they’re generous enough to give you some ad revenue from it, unlike featured snippets.
> 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.
The web is turning into Entertainment Tonight, the show my mom used to watch. Ads disguised as content.
Sure feels like the final evolution of ads will be indistinguishable from content.
On an unrelated note, we thank our sponsors and benefactors for bringing us drafts and notes we occasionally might use to augment our impeccable news coverage.
Wait five years. It will not be there.
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.
I would imagine some portion of the 1 billion Instagram users that are familiar with this style of storytelling.
its product manager at Google, looking for a promotion (and then let it rot)
I imagine Google's search results will look like Instagram's Explore tab soon enough (https://icdn6.digitaltrends.com/image/instagram-stories-expl... ) showing "trending" clips which are mostly video snippets stolen and re-posted to carry ads from the re-poster...
So... it's like watching a YouTube video, but every 10 seconds, it jumps back 10 seconds and repeats that 10 seconds, so you have to keep pressing "next [slide]" (at least Instagram/Snapchat progresses seamlessly)
God fucking damnit, people...
Snapchat and Vine started it, and now TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are all neck-deep in it. Every single one is dominated by this content in 2020, with perhaps the only area where text is still a main thing being Discord (although voice-chat is the attractive bit for gamers) & the streaming world (Twitch comments, youtube comments, niche Twitter communities).
Whether we like it or not that's where the users are, and for Google that means it's where the ads and indexing should be.
It's much better than posting the content normally and having to feel somewhat like a loser when nobody even likes/comments on it.
On Instagram I have like 6 photos uploaded the normal way. For years I've only used the "stories" system to engage with friends. It's far more personal. Don't knock it too quickly, you may find it's a step in the right direction.
I don't want it at the top of Google search as a marketing apparatus, though.
Join any big Discord gaming group and I guarantee you'll see more people chatting via text than using the audio functionality.
I agree that the text is the major activity going on at any given moment because text remains a good asynchronous repository, but if they hadn't basically integrated mumble/teamspeak to slack I'm not sure the glitter would have been enough to stick, because gamers (and some groups of discussions) definitely do rely on those voice lobbies when actually being present.
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.
Except that the protocol will be designed not for the benefit of the web in general but rather for Google to maximize its ad revenue.
I'm all for sites doing new and interesting things, but just like AMP I'm wary when these innovations are being driven by a single company that has monopolistic power over website discoverability and profitability.
Seems like it would be a magnet for low-value SEO content and outright scams.
The quote you see at first is: "Stories meet their widest audience ever."
Given that the widest audience is anyone who wants to search for something, this seems like a massive anti-trust bait.
Also, hard-pass on the continual dumbing down of content to contribute to the phenomenal attention deficit modern social media has introduced.
it's Google one AMPing (heh) Amazon's alexa actions.
You develop content they can shove in their Voice/Phone "AI" Assistants, and they throw some organic search scraps your way.
The end goal of those companies (goog, amz, appl, fb) is to be the new AOL. And the plan is the same as AOL in the 90s: controlling the new browser (the App du jour used to run searchs and scroll mindless content)
I agree that the continued increase of "shiny"-ness of "content" is basically hacking people's attention and it should be drastically clamped down - but still, I don't see the argument for how Google and AMP and the "open web" and competition interact together. What are the relevant consequences and "market forces", whose responsibility is what, etc. Could someone explain it? Thanks!
One reason Google wants the whole web to be "standard" is so they can scrape all information more easily, show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic, and create an internet information silo.
A bit more constructively: Who are the stakeholders here in the "open web"?
> show users rich content by stealing your website's traffic
Agreed. AMP allows ads, so when the users open the site the original site can receive ad revenue. But the snippets Google shows on the search results page likely deprive the original sites from traffic.
However ... it's not like Wikipedia wasn't already "stealing facts".
That's the point, isn't it?
er, isn't it explicitly tied to google?
https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
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.
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.
Which Zuck blatantly copied from Snapchat.
Google's version should be called Gnapchat...
And what do we think? Google Graveyard by 2022, or later?
I came here to read comments about more details.
I would be guilty of this. I don't use social media, so this is new to me. It is difficult to see the appeal at first glance.
Google should have 1) showed the context in which these show up and then 2) showed a snippet of code or metadata or whatever it was that made it work for some particular site, and then I feel like I would have gotten it; instead they threw up some marketing site that fails to answer even basic questions about what they are doing :/.
“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.
https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/amp-stories-bringi...
We get it, you figured out how to do clever CSS animations tied to scroll position. Thanks, I hate it.
I’ve tried 3 times and I can’t manage to stay on the page for more than a few seconds without getting frustrated and closing the tab.
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.
Facebook, to competes, rebrands as "Web Social Network". The technicians can slice hairs over who deserves it or no, but the distinction would be faint, in comparing similar name-grabbing exercises. Ok, Google, maybe you deserve it a little tiny bit more, maybe a smidge, but hardly.
Yes, the point of AMP is for Google to control content distribution on the web, and they entice you to give up control over your content by offering you exposure, for now, just like they did with the Top Stories carousel in Google Search.
The irony of Top Stories is that it forced publishers to use AMP in order to regain the search results placement they already had, before Google took it away by pushing down search results to make room for the new carousel that featured AMP pages.
AMP also still properly directs both ads and analytics metrics, and in some cases can be hosted on caches you own, but even if not, having it hosted in a different cache is also not giving up control.
At no point in this process are you losing control of your content. If you don't want to participate, then don't. Creators decide to put their content on TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and now this is yet another avenue they can put their contents on. How is it any different?
Only if the ads and analytics are AMP supported and in the list of AMP approved vendors I think, for example: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-...
[0] https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/
That should cover basically every user, but it's also open source so you can contribute any you think is missing.
Also, how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok? The latter didn't even have an creator program until very recently, so you were literally posting your content for free.
80 out of thousands of analytics platforms and custom analytics scripts is a very limited list.
> how many choices for analytics and ad networks do you have when you put content on Snapchat, Instagram or TikTok?
But that's the thing with AMP, I still would expect content to be served as it was on my site, it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
Do you have a source on that? Also what % of websites use an analytic provider not included in those 80? I don't have a source either but my personal experience says it'snegligibly small, probably below 0.1%.
> it's not like I am creating content for AMP and get an audience on AMP.
But I think it actually is. Look at this front page screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/HEjjXqm.png
Google is pushing these stories to their users on the discovery feed, so it actually is all about getting an audience from AMP. Yes, it is still being served from your own site, and while there are some limitation, you still have orders of magnitude more control over the content that you would on literally any other platform.
Another "social" attempt from Google.
Anyone remember Google+?
That's what popped in my mind when the title ("Stories meet their widest audience ever").
Maybe something like emacs, but AMP-based, and we'll have the worst of two worlds!
So to answer your question, probably still at google, just not associated with the "stories" team anymore. It's a game of hot potato where you don't want to be stuck on a team not shipping/innovating since those are the same teams that get spun down (though to be fair it sounds like they just get absorbed onto the "google blob" instead of being let go most of the time).
It's sad that people that are the most passionate are the ones who suffer the most (suffer in terms of not getting funds/time/etc to expand a product they care deeply for and for their troubles get shifted to some other team when Google loses interest in their "baby").
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.
> Yahoo! Search is a rebadged version of the Bing search engine owned by Yahoo!, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
You might be surprised what Joe Average uses. I run into people who not only still use MapQuest, but use it as a verb.
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.
More importantly, this is still driven by one or two big players using this format. If those players decide to innovate with the format, it could radically alter how people feel about it and it could lose in popularity, or it could change enough that Google's implementation becomes irrelevant unless they alter it significantly as well (which then gives more work downstream, which could make publishers stop bothering with it if they ever did).
This feels super fragile and tbh looks more like a desperate play from Google than an adoptive one.
In fact, you know what an adoptive one would look like to me? Having google start seriously indexing stories and be able to show them in rich media results.
I think the difference is: one approach is ad driven, one is search driven.
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.
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.
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.
If being the indisputable number 1 player for almost a decade and being in the conversation for being the GOAT of one of the oldest, most studied, more competitive mental sports in the world does not qualify you for that nothing does. I could hardly ever think of a better example.You can count PhDs in the hundred of thousands, SV engineers in the same range.There are 36 2700+ players in the world, there are 2 +2800 players.There has been only 1 WC in the last 7 years.
I have no idea also what you meant by "transferring skills" or do you think a a "genius" CS kid in Google can quit and tomorrow become a neurosurgeon? All people are specialists. Ironically is Magnum, again, who has demonstrated flexibility by topping Fantasy Football, a game played by millions.
It's you who doesn't seem to grasp anything about the world of chess. From the time commitment and skill needed to get to the very top (Some people has argued is equivalent to the effort of getting 2 PhDs)to the esteem and reputation they have in the society at large.People like Bobby Fischer, Gary Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik, are considered veritable geniuses, in the same league of Fields Medals winners. Almost nobody in FAANGs is in that league.
Chess is not "just" memory and pattern matching (Although those are pretty impressive,many Nobel-worthy discoveries have been that),it is mental and physical stamina, imagination, ability to perform under heavy time pressure , creativity and almost all the qualities heavily linked to any intelectual work.
From the man himself:
"I’m not saying that I am totally stupid. But my success mainly has to do with the fact that I had the opportunity to learn more, more quickly. It has become easier to get hold of information. The players from the Soviet Union used to be at a huge advantage; in Moscow they had access to vast archives, with countless games carefully recorded on index cards. Nowadays anyone can buy this data on DVD for 150 euros; one disk holds 4.5 million games. There are also more books than there used to be. And then of course I started working with a computer earlier than Vladimir Kramnik or Viswanathan Anand."
Another quote from that same interview:
"Carlsen: I’m not a genius."
Some sources:
https://www.chess.com/news/view/-misconceptions-about-chess-players
https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-chess-make-you-smarter-1479403551
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/31/do-chess-players-have-higher-iqs-11366
https://en.chessbase.com/post/magnus-carlsen-on-his-che-career
https://www.chess.com/blog/RoaringPawn/magnus-carlsen-a-genius-or-automaton
https://gardinerchess.com.au/fm-stojic-is-magnus-carlsen-a-genius/And yet here you are.
Find me a quote of a really accomplished person calling themselves a genius.
* 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...
That's probably by design. The stories are meant to be discovered while searching on Google. Of course a site owner should have the common sense to include a separate section on their site for stories. In most CMSs, It would be as simple as setting a 'web stories' category, then adding a link to the navigation that takes them to a dynamically generated page, something like "example.com/web-stories/"
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...
Edit: here's the technical documentation, https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/?format=s...
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.
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.
It’s like the blink tag, but instead of being the result of a drunken bet on Castro St in Mountain View, it’s the result of $1,000,000’s in engineering effort and focus groups.
Yup, as much as I also hate the format, that's the format of stories as popularised by Snapchat/Instagram/TikTok etc. Keep it all very slick, but devoid of content.
(It looks like they already do this in their mobile app)
I wish google would just index the web. This is getting out of hand.
"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?
Well, at least until the product doesn't gain much traction and Google kills it.
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.
If you don't like, you don't have to use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
P.S. Feel free to ask about longer trial or discounts!
If executed well I do see this being successful. But it's Google, the team which developed is may very well be working on something else and this will most likely not get marketing budget and support needed to succeed.
I know that Pixelfed has their own Instagram-inspired Stories functionality – ephemeral stories that disappear after 24h. What Google has built here seems to be a b2c-focused product.
Better Intro: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...
For this, how is it different than a webpage? Why would I do whatever this is instead of just making a webpage with the same content?
Is it just the interface where you swipe from one to the next? Is that supposed to be some amazing innovation?
Social is Google's Moby Dick haha. You'll get it one day big G.
+ This last one's a bet. I'll check back next year
It would be really, really funny if it wasn't so horribly, horribly sad.
What's next GitHub Stories?
Stack Overflow Stories!
Hacker News Stories?
Also LinkedIn has them now. Which I would argue is still better than LinkedIn's other new addition, an entirely new black hole for event invites. As if the signal-to-noise ratio for these weren't bad enough on Facebook...
[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bar9.sto...
[0] https://www.inc.com/amy-nelson/women-drive-majority-of-consu...
They fail when they try to mimic their competitors. Their cloud services trail Amazon. Their hardware trails Apple. Their social media trails... everybody.
You can see it in their intranets. Google uses personal web pages, forums, and search. It is similar to the internet in 2004. Facebook uses a miniature copy of Facebook.
While it still existed, Google+ was far better than any other popular social media site around. I'm sure I don't need to offer any critique of Facebook, and Twitter's UX was an absolute disaster before they implemented usable threading.
Sure, our grandmothers weren't going to start using it, but I've seen what they're posting on Facebook and as far as I'm concerned that was an extreme positive.
It had working pseudonymity.
I could also post to different contexts from the same persona.
It was easy to read.
I experienced little spam and next to no politics.
Probably more.
Bing now gives me results from the customer intranets kind of like an improved version of the old Google Desktop Search.
Google has, despite us telling them again and again, "improved" search to the point where it can find thousands of pages that contains something somehow similar to what I searched for, yet completely irrelevant.
I.e. not worse than the competitors, just equally bad.
Except maybe Google fails in more spectacular ways on search thanks to AI: some of the irrelevant results feel uncanny, like: I can see how they got there, but seriously: it doesn't match what I searched for and it utterly irrelevant.
That looks like the perfect thing outside of google's core business that's going to be killed in like a year or something.
Though the best quote in that article is Kevin Systrom:
> Just like when Facebook invented the [News] Feed, and every social product was like, ‘That’s an innovation, how do we adapt that to our network,’ you’re going to see stories pop up in other networks over time, because it’s one of the best ways to show visual information in chronological order.
Stories are a quick and easy way to consume light content. And that's really it, you wouldn't be using this for Wikipedia-style articles.
They failed with gchat, they failed with google wave, they failed with orkut, they failed with google+.... They can't seem to stop trying to worm their way into social tech.
They just don't get that their brand doesn't work for this and nobody is buying it.
All I know is that as a user I can only describe my emotional reaction as "revulsion" whenever they unveil one of their new cash-grab copies of someone else's platform.
That's it. There's more to it, but that's the primary view I have of them. Gmail was good once, then got bloated and slow. Search was good once, but is now Search for Stuff to Buy. All sorts of other things were good once, and now don't exist.
So when you said, "I don't know what this is and I don't want to know", I'm right there with you. I feel like I already know the part that will make me ignore it, so I'm not going to spend another minute on it. (Other than to trash it here, of course :)
Anywho, as it stands now, Google seem to be finding new ways to set up toll-booths on the internet via search lock-in. That's their new mantra. Whatever happened to organizing the world's information? Even their "About 2,800,000 results" is total BS. I can't go past page 20 on almost all queries.
This is a natural extension of web.
What ?
Domain name.
Google: Stories are cool now, no?
I used to be the first to any new Google tech. Android, google Fi, google play music, and on and on. Now, I'm working towards degoogling entirely.
Another take away: Lots have pointed that the design is `silly`. Well I think is was intentional and in the context of what Google is trying to achieve well designed. The layout of Google Stories is a sign that modern users don't read anymore. All stories are pure images, conceptual images with little text as possible.
That's because it is AMP