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**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, only kind of. Here's the low-down here... If I may put on my tinfoil hat for a second, I think one of the primary motivations here is to make the web better. I think the intentions are good. Like Malte Ubl and Paul Bakaus, some of the people working on this are absolutely fundamental believers in... |
So AMP web pages show up in a carousel above the results. Now, speed is already an indicator in pagerank, but AMP is not a specific -- like, you could have a faster page than an AMP page and technically be ranked higher... It's not the fact that you're using AMP is good. That will automatically change some things. But ... |
Actually, a lot of people don't know this... If you click on to an AMP page from the carousel, you can see the contextual relationship -- I clicked on the middle one, and the article before was this, and the article after was this, and they're all part of the same new story, even though they're different, specific arti... |
\[12:08\] There are arrows in the top nav bar, and you can click actually between the carousel from the different websites. You can just page through the different articles somewhat instantly, which is something I've never used, but also seems kind of cool. But absolutely, all the feedback from content developers is "W... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, so I hate this. This is terrible. So there's the AMP format, which is basically a set of really good practices, for being a good mobile citizen, and making your stuff fast on mobile. That's great. They've done a great job there, it's great to get people on that bandwagon, but all of those posit... |
You can stand on a high horse and say, "We're doing this on the web, whereas, say, Facebook and Apple News aren't; they're doing their own proprietary thing." But all they're doing is their one-off proprietary thing on top of web technologies. They're only putting content into this carousel that has specifically opted ... |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you cannot conflate web technologies with the web platform. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. |
**Alex Sexton:** Cool. So the fact that they're using web technology to distribute their own things is irrelevant. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right. Classically, what Google does is they go out into the web as it is and index it and try to make some kind of sense out of the chaos with the search product, right? This is going the opposite direction, where it's saying "We're defining a format that ostensibly we control. In order to get into ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, it doesn't change your rank, but it does show you above even the first result. But theoretically, once everyone did AMP, the carousel would be correctly ordered, I assume. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So basically once everybody changes the entire web, then... \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** I was being hyperbolic. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I understand you were being facetious, but this has some really bad consequences today. To get into the politics/fake news side of things, a lot of really terrible, pseudo-news organizations have adopted these technologies before more reputable organizations. An example of this... Just the other day ... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... To be clear, I think that is a specific case of a larger problem at Google, and with the political -- like, the same thing is true if AMP doesn't exist, where Breitbart is the second result in the organic results. I think it's just a very difficult thing, because those articles have so much tra... |
I think AMP certainly adds negatively to that pile; so I'm not defending AMP for this, but I don't think killing AMP would in any way solve that problem, for what it's worth. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:58\] Well, it seems like they have more solutions in their regular search results than they do in AMP right now, at least. Or there's just less content, so it's easier to game. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. It's early days. |
**Rachel White:** Is all of this stuff that I've seen recently because of the fake news things? Where people are like "Google gives you these horrible results when you search for things politically..." |
**Alex Sexton:** That's what I'm saying, it's true regardless of AMP. |
**Rachel White:** Okay. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sometimes Google... Like, the instant answer thing will be just as bad -- "How much does Joe Biden make per year?" and then the answer is "Joe Biden siphons money out of the pizza restaurant in Atlanta", or whatever. I think it's just an extremely hard problem. Maybe they shouldn't be doing it because ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... I also just worry -- there's a lot of work that people put into making their content accessible to AMP, so in this new context -- |
**Alex Sexton:** That's only kind of true. AMP is actually pretty easy to integrate with. I think easier than literally every other performance framework that has ever existed for these content creators, for what it's worth. The reason why every major news organization already has AMP pages is because it's so easy to i... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but the centralization aspect of it is concerning to me. That is a performance boost within the Google ecosystem, but that doesn't solve performance outside of that context at all. |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, it does. It solves performance outside of the context, just not to the extent that it solves it inside the thing. Like I said before, I think one of the saving things... AMP is not my favorite thing. I know you dislike it, so I'm trying to at least have an interesting discussion, but the idea tha... |
It's because we're relying on Apple to maintain their App Store in order to get software, and if their store stops existing, then all of a sudden we have no software and we have to redo everything from scratch. And that's absolutely not true with AMP. I think it still maintains the web, it just never directs you to tha... |
**Rachel White:** Well, I think that neither Mikeal or I really knew too much about the integration methods or the reasoning -- well, obviously the reasoning behind it is kind of self-explanatory... But I knew nothing about it, other than it was a thing that existed. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, you can turn on a Wordpress plugin and your site is AMP-compatible. |
**Rachel White:** Uh-oh... Well, that explains a lot. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, you can break that with other plugins, but yeah... That is pretty true. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm still incredibly skeptical of this notion that adding AMP support to these sites is actually making them better generally in terms of mobile performance. There are sites that come up in that carousel all the time - like The Huffington Post - that I know for a fact when I pull up on mobile are ter... |
**Alex Sexton:** Sorry, better than they were before... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I don't even know if that's true, though... It seems like they're taking a lot of the garbage and just putting it around the AMP thing now, and just saying "We don't even need to worry about mobile performance anymore, because most people are reading it through this AMP thing." |
**Alex Sexton:** \[20:12\] Sure, that's a very good criticism. You can serve different things to Google than you serve to users; that's pretty tried and true. They have a UA, and all that kind of stuff. So absolutely there could be this backlash. If I'm trying to jump into the heads of the Google engineers that did thi... |
So I think it should be a fundamental goal of the AMP project to enforce somehow that regular website are getting faster along with the AMP websites. I think that would go a long way to assuage those fears. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. I mean, I'll reiterate again... And full disclosure, Malta, who's one of the lead engineers over there, is a good friend of mine... \[laughs\] The format is great; I wish that people followed the format and didn't have all the other garbage on their websites. I think that the issues that we ten... |
**Break:** \[22:19\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Alright, now we're gonna talk a little bit about JavaScript fatigue. I'm certainly fatigued... I even forgot that the topic was gonna be JS fatigue. There's been an amazing amount of tweets and articles about this, and it's already reaching the point where people are just referencing JS fatigue and a... |
**Alex Sexton:** We already have JS-fatigue fatigue. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, exactly. Rachel, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you think this means? What have you seen out there in the New York community about this? Because I know a whole lot of these articles have actually been written by the New York crew. |
**Rachel White:** Alright! Well, let me tell you... I think the JavaScript fatigue is like the burden of choice of "I have so many things to use. What should I use? What can I use?" |
\[24:04\] Now I'm reading this thing and it's right down all of the framework, build tools, libraries you can think of for 30 seconds straight and stop. You could keep on writing the whole entire 30 seconds. |
There's so many different JavaScript libraries that all achieve the same end goal but in various ways, depending on what you need for it. There's multiple bundlers, there's multiple things that handle your routing in Node, there's multiple ways to do JavaScript animations, there's multiple MVCs, there's multiple packag... |
**Alex Sexton:** It's almost a social thing. It's like "I don't wanna be the person using the old, broken thing... What's cool to use?" |
**Rachel White:** Exactly. |
**Alex Sexton:** I know it's not entirely that, but there's a part of that that's there. |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I mean... Whenever something comes out, people always jump on trying to learn it as fast as possible, so that they don't have that FOMO of not knowing about what's hot in the JavaScript library. The worst part of it is you're gonna get as many different responses for "What should I use to achiev... |
**Alex Sexton:** To that example, as an austinite, you'll get a ton of different answers, but in general, I feel like a) good problem to have, and b) you're probably gonna have good tacos regardless of what you choose. I hate -- this is a very rare moment in my mind where I think... Mikeal probably has some good opinio... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No... It is pretty unique, yeah. |
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