Accelerated Mobile Pages Hangouts: Starting this Friday

Instant. Everywhere. That’s the goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project: an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once, and have it load instantly everywhere.

We know you’ve got questions about AMP, and we will do our very best to answer them and help you create a better mobile experience for your users. 

Over the next 6 weeks, we’ll host weekly Hangouts on Air with speakers discussing AMP and many of its specific components. — News Lab Open Office Hour: Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) featuring Richard Gingras, Head of News @Google

“Office hours” are a great idea – and I’ll be there – and yet I think there’s more to be done to help get the word out, and to get people exited, about AMP.

A few weeks ago, I reached out to Richard Gingras proposing some ideas on how to “make AMP ‘irresistible’ to the broader news publisher community.”

The notion came out of a quick conversation with Stacie Chan about a positioning or messaging challenge that might be impacting AMP’s rapid adoption. Specifically, when I’m speaking to publishers, many of them express that AMP is “yet another” thing that their newsroom development team needs to implement.

I believe there’s an good argument to be made that AMP should be positioned as an opportunity instead: An opportunity to explore the open web of tomorrow, today; an opportunity to start fresh, and from the ground up; an opportunity to build on a wealth of best practices from the industry.

I would proposed that one effecient way to do this quickly and effectively is to get newsroom development teams in a room for a day or two to document the types of content that they typically deliver beyond the basic text and image story. I’ve heard many such lists rhymed off quickly by those in the know, and there’s an excellent library here.

With that list in hand: the teams could develop several “intents to implement” and prototype implementations, with the guidance of someone like Rudy Galfi.

At the end of the process, newsroom execs could be invited in to see the results — demonstrating several unique types of “furiously fast & compelling content” (to quote Gringas) that can be delivered with AMP.

I believe that AMP development is moving too fast for most newsroom developers to stay up-to-date with, and that this type of an in-person, face-to-face undertaking would both address that knowledge gap, as well as providing tangible opportunities for new developers to get involved with the project and to get excited about the opportunities that AMP provides.

In the meantime, I’ll see you this Friday for the first Hangout.

P.S. If you’re interested in helping to organize an in-person, hands-on AMP deep dive, please drop me a note here or on Twitter.