Google Thinks The Future Of The Web
Is . . . Email
Google is making email a lot more interactive, to save you all those
confusing clicks.
When was the last time you were lost on your
smartphone? Because for me, it was just this morning. Whether on Facebook,
Twitter, or email itself, I end up tapping something that takes me to a web page
stuck inside an app, and I’m left scratching my head, wait, aren’t I just on
the web? What app am I in again?
Now Google is taking aim at just this problem
with a new initiative called AMP for Email. Instead of an email from Pinterest just kicking
you to some in-app browser or an external app as soon as you tap one of its
links, a new AMP-infused Pinterest email is the web. So you
can pin to your heart’s content, right inside the email window. With AMP for
Email, you never need to leave the message itself to browse web content.
How does Google pull this off? It’s letting
email developers incorporate its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) standard. You probably already use AMP every day without
realizing it. Basically, Google caches many publisher websites so that they
load faster–meaning much of the news we consume on a daily basis is often
delivered via AMP. (In fact, AMP now sends more
traffic to publishers than Facebook.) But
there’s a catch: For now, Gmail is the only email client supporting the spec.
However, it’s an open standard, so any other email app is free to use it, too.
Usually this sort of insider baseball
development standard stuff isn’t worth writing about, but AMP for Email comes
at a particularly salient time. The opaque algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, and
Instagram can make promoting content organically (i.e., without paying) a tricky matter. As a publisher especially, you may have an
important piece of news for the world to read, but unless you pay to promote
it, you’re just hoping that the right people see the story and share it across
social media.
This trend has made the humble email
newsletter a resilient tool for publishers and advertisers alike.
Emails–disregarding the truly annoying spam, of course–are still vital to
getting your eyes on a clearance deal for Gap jeans along with fascinating
stories like this one. In an uncertain digital world, the global adoption of
good old email keeps growing at
a steady rate, year after year–probably because it’s both
so personal and predictable in the age of random feeling, social news feeds.
People just seem to like email, even if we sometimes complain about it. It has
the highest ROI in digital marketing.
But as I mentioned earlier, apps, websites,
and email don’t mix all that well on smartphones–whether we’re talking iOS or
Android. While linking from one app to another is entirely possible, most apps
opt to keep us inside (likely to keep their overall engagement up, but it’s
also just generally faster, too). This tendency has brought us to a weird time
when your phone’s entire metaphor
of one app for every purpose is
shattered. Your primary web browser app is secondary to browsing the web within
the containers of Gmail or Facebook. As a result, your mental construct of what
content lives where is broken, and it’s now incredibly easy to get lost on your
phone.
I’m not sure that AMP email will fix this
problem, but it’s a start. Instead of shuttling the user from an email to the
web and back, email is simply becoming the web–a deep, browsable entity rather
than a shallow promotional facade. And with more clear information available at
our fingertips, I’m betting it’s the type of update that will be better for
users, publishers, and promoters alike.
BY MARK WILSON
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90160460/google-thinks-the-future-of-the-web-is-email?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Weekly&position=2&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=02162018
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