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Google Stories

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Re: Google Stories

#51

Post by scoopertrooper »

stingraycharles wrote: post #24

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 o…

The show cases make things slightly more clear.

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/

Re: Google Stories

#52

Post by sktrdie »

stingraycharles wrote: post #24

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 o…

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.

Re: Google Stories

#54

Post by function_seven »

aerovistae wrote: post #33
dhnajsjdnd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they should take the Google name off it?

I don't know how to solve Google's problems and I don't pretend to. If I did I'd write a carefully thought-out Medium post and get claps and reshares and so on. 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.

Here's how I view the Google brand in a nutshell: Half-assed crap that will fall out from under me, with bright colors.

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 :)

Re: Google Stories

#55

Post by bdd »

Is there a betting pool for this being the most quickly retired Google product ever? I have some extra cash lying around.

Re: Google Stories

#56

Post by scarmig »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #23
scrollaway wrote: post #9

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,…

Amazon has been aggressively eating into Google's search advertising market share, which is actually the biggest threat to Google's model today (aside from general obsolescence as activity drifts away from the open web).

Re: Google Stories

#58

Post by janaagaard »

stingraycharles wrote: post #24

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 o…

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.

https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/start/vis...

Re: Google Stories

#59

Post by thekyle »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #23
scrollaway wrote: post #9

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,…

Microsoft Bing competes with Google Search.

Re: Google Stories

#60

Post by rchaud »

stingraycharles wrote: post #24

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 o…

This is designed to compete with Instagram/FB/Whatsapp Stories: https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/instagram/138416-what-...

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.

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