On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Luis --
I honestly don't see a lot of difference between Google, Twitter and
Facebook, since they are all ad supported entities with a fiscal
responsibility to track their users and sell the data. Apple's a bit
different on the surface since they have a different business model. I
agree that these are bad for the internet but so are incredibly slow web
pages that make apps essentially required for a good experience.
I agree that the companies all have (essentially[1]) the same motives at
the company level. The difference is that Google's technical approach to
solving the latency problem is not explicitly tied to Google or to
particular Google apps. (There is a pure web demo, for example, which works
in any mobile browser, including Firefox for Android, and Twitter - a
Google competitor - has already adopted it.) In contrast, Facebook and
Apple's "solutions" for fast reading are very explicitly tied to (1) apps,
not browsers, and (2) apps specifically from those companies. There will
never be a future where Facebook's solution for latency works outside of
Facebook; there is (at least in theory, and possibly in practice w/
Twitter) such a future with AMP.
Or to put it another way: Google's solution still might not be good, but
it's at least possible that it could keep content on the open web; Facebook
and Apple are pretty explicitly trying to kill the open web. There is no
way the long game of the FB/Apple apps lead to good outcomes for
independent publishers like us.
On the analytics, this would probably not include
their use of our content
in the knowledge graph or elsewhere
Oh, definitely won't. But it might give us some leverage in those
discussions - having conceded that the analytics from some cached pages
should be shared, it is no longer such a huge leap to analytics on other
types of "cached"/processed data.
and also might be troublesome for those who prefer
google not to track
their reading.
There is a lot of devil in those details, of course, but for those coming
from Google Search (still the vast majority of our users) the first leap is
already tracked/known to Google. This doesn't necessarily make that worse.
(Much depends on how the caching occurs; their ability to track the
*second* page you read would be new, at least for iOS users - Android users
already have this problem, I believe.)
Bryan's ticket is a good embarkation point for
thinking about supporting
new clients; Reading is also planning some Reading infrastructure work for
the summit which could relate[1]
Great link, thanks.
[1] The subtle difference, from our perspective, is that Google has pretty
strong incentives to keep the open web viable, because making sense of (and
selling ads on) the open web is their core competence. Facebook and Apple,
in contrast, have no strategic reason to keep the open web viable: if they
can turn every publisher into a FB-only or Apple-only publisher, they'd
happily do that. Of course, an open web that doesn't depend on Google would
be even better, but that's not in the cards at this point unless Mozilla
wakes up.
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Luis Villa <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Toby -
I'm generally 1000% on-board with slow follower for anything user-facing.
The only reason I might make an exception here is because the competitors
you mention are all pretty awful for the web generally, and this has uptake
already from Google and Twitter. (Two isn't great, but two + slim
opportunity for growth is way better than the guaranteed
never-greater-than-1 we'll see from FB's option.)
The other reason this intrigues me is that if Google builds in some
analytics, it might give us a better sense of their current usages for us
than we currently have. Not much, obviously, but at least something.
(Remember that in this scenario - direct access from Google properties -
they already have all that information, the only question is whether it
gets shared with us so that we can do something useful with it.)
That said, if implementing it is non-trivial, it doesn't make sense to
spend a huge number of cycles to fast-follow. Hopefully some of the
improvements Bryan mentions will make it easier in the future - it
certainly doesn't look like we're in a world where the number of front ends
is going to get smaller any time soon.
Luis
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Thanks Bryan and Pine.
My feeling is that there are many many new interfaces and form factors
emerging right now and we should be cautious about adoption. For example
Facebook's instant articles, apple news and even snapchat have similar
offerings the AMP.
They all seem to be focusing on article speed in a landscape where most
pages are larded up with a variety of trackers, ads and other scripts
(which we don't have, although we have our own challenges on performance)
with the ultimate goal of owning the delivery platform.
I'm nervous about picking winners in such a landscape although I'm
excited about prototypes like things like the Apple Watch app that came out
of the Lyon hackathon. I feel like a slow follower model where we see which
solution if any becomes widely used is more appropriate for us.
-Toby
On Thursday, October 8, 2015, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Bryan,
Ah, I was thinking of the 2 different mobile web editing experiences
(not 2 different apps) for Android depending on form factor. My
understanding is that tablets have VE enabled on mobile web now (I have yet
to try it) while phones do not have VE enabled on mobile web yet.
Pine
On Oct 8, 2015 12:56 PM, "Bryan Davis" <bd808(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 1:32 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > We currently have at least 6 channels, I believe:
> >
> > 1. Desktop Web
> > 2. Mobile Web
> > 3. Android phone
> > 4. Android tablet
>
> I don't think that we have separate native apps for the phone and
> tablet form factors.
>
> > 5. IPhone
> > 6. Legacy Android phone
> >
> > I'm no expert on mobile developmemt, but perhaps WMF could
> experiment with
> > Google's idea on just one channel to start?
>
> AMP would only be appropriate for the mobile web channel from the list
> above. Implementing it would be a matter of placing some sort of
> translating proxy between MediaWiki and the requesting user agent that
> downgraded the HTML produced by MediaWiki to AMP's restricted HTML
> dialect. That sort of translation might be possible in MobileFrontend
> but it would likely be accomplished much more easily using some other
> tech stack that had good support for manipulation of HTML like a
> node.js service. It might be an interesting prototype project for a
> volunteer to experiment with a frontend app that consumed the RESTBase
> provided Parsoid HTML (e.g.
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/html/NOFX) and spit out AMP
> compliant documents.
>
> The only other option really to produce alternate HTML from MediaWiki
> would require swapping out the existing layer that translates an
> article's wikitext to HTML with a version that spoke AMP instead. That
> would be related to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114194.
>
> Bryan
> --
> Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
> irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855
>
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Luis Villa
Sr. Director of Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
*Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely
share in the sum of all knowledge.*
--
Luis Villa
Sr. Director of Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
*Working towards a world in which every single human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge.*