For those of you not currently undertaking your annual digital detox, hello and welcome to the latest edition of our weekly round-up of the hottest digital news! This week’s digest is an AMP special, so in addition to a quick run-down of the latest news, reports and initiatives from around the web, we have a little more detail and analysis (courtesy of Superdream Senior Web Developer Josh Pyzer) on the latest phase of Google’s AMP project…
But first, here are a few of our other top picks:
**Good artists copy, great artists steal… Instagram launch ‘Stories’ feature**
Instagram has overhauled its UX design with (link: http://blog.instagram.com/post/148348940287/160802-stories text: the launch of an undeniably familiar ‘Stories’ feature). In the same style as Snapchat, the new feature lets users create fleeting photo and video reels that will disappear after 24 hours. These appear at the top of your newsfeed.
We have to admit – we’re impressed! Whilst not terribly original, this new feature is incredibly easy to use and brings a whole new dimension to this well-loved social network by letting its users share less ‘finished’ real-world updates and snippets in-between their carefully curated, picture-perfect posts on their news feeds, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be there forever. And the biggest ace up Instagram’s sleeve? Their enviably large user base (many of whom are not also on Snapchat) who don’t need to waste any time adding new connections to start sharing their lives with their networks via ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ style posts.
**Battery status indicators used to track devices**
Researchers have found that, (link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/03/privacy-smartphones-battery-life text: as previously warned), a feature of HTML5 that lets site owners tell how much battery life a mobile device has left has been found to enable tracking online. Intended to help low-power versions of sites and apps be served to users that have little battery power left, it has also been used to spy on, and in some cases, exploit users. For example showing higher prices when it’s known that users have a limited time to make a purchasing decision.
**Uber plots global roadmap **
Uber has announced a whopping £380m investment in a global mapping project to rival Google Maps. This week too, Uber has been banned from Taiwan due to their registration in the region as a software company and a taxi business.
**Javascript tops biannual programming language ranking**
Technology Analyst firm RedMonk has just released the latest version of its biannual rankings of programming languages, and once again JavaScript tops the list, followed by Java and PHP.
**60% of US searches now made on mobile**
According to Google statements, more than 50% of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. A recent (link: http://hitwise.connexity.com/070116_MobileSearchReport_CD_US.html text: report) by Hitwise shows this to be nearer to 60% in the US.
**Apple Music out of beta on Android**
Apple Music on Android is now out of beta and boasts a few unique features including a homescreen widget for playback purposes and offline music downloading to an inserted SD card.
**Snapping pics of your hotel room for social good**
We’ve just heard about an interesting project by the Exchange Initiative call TraffickCam that encourages holiday goers to snap and upload pictures of their hotel rooms to help authorities investigating sex trafficking narrow their searches. It also has the added benefits of raising awareness of this awful practice so next time you snap that ‘just arrived’ pic, make sure you also share it with TraffickCam. TraffickCam is available for free on the (link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/traffickcam/id1067713017?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D8 text: iOS App Store) and (link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exchangeinitiative.traffickcam text: Google Play).
**This week’s featured story:**** **
**Google’s AMP project to be expanded to full search results**
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Google has announced that they plan to roll out their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) search results beyond the current “Top stories” and into the full Google search results.
The AMP project has been set up by Google to speed up mobile webpages. This is achieved by serving stripped back versions of webpages, which are cached and served on their own servers. I wrote an (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/an-introduction-to-amp/ text: introduction into AMP), which goes into more detail on the basics of AMP.
In their (link: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/amp-your-content-preview-of-amped.html text: announcement) this week, Google revealed that they have more than 150 million AMP docs in their index following the introducing of these to the “Top stories” results in February. They also have over 4 million new pages being added to the index every week. The interest and uptake in the project has led Google to roll AMP to the full search results.
(image: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/superdream/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/04125028/AmpBlueLinksDemo_v3_garciarobert.gif alt: AmpBlueLinksDemo_v3_garciarobert)
We first saw AMP being used by news publishers but the technology has been embraced by non-news publishers like eBay, Reddit, Trip Advisor and more. This new uptake could also have affected the decision by Google to roll AMP out further.
You might think these AMP pages will get a ranking boost from Google but apparently not. Google have said they will not boost AMP pages in search rankings but already boost quick loading (mobile friendly) web pages. Make from that what you will.
This surely has to be the future of the web. People want content fast and Google like to see people get their content fast. I’m sure it wont be long before we see the whole Internet stripped back and built for speed. What do you think?
(image: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/superdream/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/04125122/AMPdemo.gif alt: AMPdemo)