Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stories

stories.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 251 posts

Re: Google Stories

#71

Post by ilamont »

sktrdie wrote: post #52
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 conten…

> 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.

Seems like it would be a magnet for low-value SEO content and outright scams.

Re: Google Stories

#72

Post by Arkdy »

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.

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...

Re: Google Stories

#73

Post by whoisjuan »

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.

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.

Re: Google Stories

#74

Post by johnatwork »

freediver wrote: post #7
stevenpetryk wrote: post #3

Let's take a moment of silence in solidarity with all the engineers who will now have to make their company's blog support this.

And let's take a moment of silence in solidarity for all engineers who worked on this when this gets scraped.

"It's been an incredible journey, and we would like to thank all those who have shared it with us."

Re: Google Stories

#76

Post by reidjs »

thekyle wrote: post #59
bmmayer1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have yet to meet someone that uses bing, but maybe that’s just because I’m in the Silicon Valley bubble

Re: Google Stories

#77

Post by turtlebits »

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.

Re: Google Stories

#78

Post by marcodave »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #51
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/

> Why anyone would want this? I do not know.

its product manager at Google, looking for a promotion (and then let it rot)

Re: Google Stories

#80

Post by ljm »

sktrdie wrote: post #52
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 conten…

So, another AMP-style thing where Google uses their platform and network effect to further encroach on the open web and turn it into the Google web?

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.

Post reply on HN