With Facebook incorporating Snapchat like stories feature into each of their products, be it Messenger, Whatsapp or Instagram, even the tech-giant Google is following suit with their own version of Daily Stories.
On Tuesday, Google delivered this exciting news, of daily stories which Google calls the AMP Stories. These shall be integrated within the search engine itself, and its template is available for anyone to use without any cost.
The concept is relatively similar to Snapchat stories or the much less known YouTube Reels. Basically, these are designed in such a way that they could best be viewed on a Mobile Phone. Whatever the text is, Google’s Algorithm would easily convert it into a mixture of images and videos which the user can also interact with. Basically, it works on the same principle as followed by AMP, which is meant to deliver articles quickly from just searching them. Therefore, this advanced version would enable you to quickly see a story on your smartphone.
The product manager for AMP at Google wrote in a blog post that, “AMP stories are built on the technical infrastructure of AMP to provide a fast, beautiful experience on the mobile web.”
To be honest, it still isn’t the alternative to Snapchat stories posted by friends, but rather give a tough competition to Snapchat’s “Discover”. Following the Discovers’ way, Google AMP stories would basically help the news websites, to fast relay targeted news the way it is done over at Snapchat: Making Images and Video Slideshows.
Snapchat’s Vice President had his own view to the Google’s new release,” Our ambition at Snapchat is to empower great storytelling, and we think we have pioneered the best format for doing that on mobile. We’re delighted to see that an industry is starting to form around that, and hope that it will encourage more newsrooms to invest in teams that focus on made-for-mobile content.”
The threat to SnapChat can be quite large. This is because Google is widely popular for the number of users daily it has, and so is a major source for advertising one’s product. If Google is successful with their product, it shall mean, that advertising revenue overall for Snapchat could turn out to be less, since it would be split, when people move over to Google’s version. In short words, Snapchat’s monopoly could be destroyed.
There is another question which might need some answering. What would happen if Facebook along with all its products delves into this area too with their own version of Discover? That would seriously mean some competition as all the tech-giants shall be fighting for revenue. It should be noted that there aren’t currently any advertisements on Google’s AMP Stories.
If you want to have a quick peek at what the AMP stories would actually look like, you can do if you are a developer since developer previews are out. Furthermore, if you want to get the hang of creating them, then you can easily follow the tutorial at this link.