On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 12:34 AM, Joaquin Oltra Hernandez <
jhernandez(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
If you really wanted to, you can subset what you
send to mobile browsers
and get the same benefits (provided you use a really good CDN).
I think this announcement + the transcoding work Google is doing show
that this ^ is something we should be strongly considering. If google can
transcode our content and make it significantly faster (as Gergo showed in
another thread) and/or other sites are adopting similar technology, than
our users are going to expect a level of speed far higher than we can
currently provide. I don't care if we use google's or our own, but do want
to make sure we aren't rebuilding the wheel if we don't have to.
The conversations as to whether or not google is acting out of self
interest are fairly moot (they are...always), but I think Luis's points are
very apt about googles self interests being more closely aligned with ours
on the web than the other big players in this space.
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Luis Villa <lvilla(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
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.*
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