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Report: Google & Twitter Are Working On Accelerated Mobile Pages For Publishers

The companies are developing an open source version of "instant articles" to solve the problem of slow loading mobile sites, Recode reports.

Martin Beck on September 11, 2015 at 12:45 pm

Looks like Facebook’s “Instant Articles” and Apple’s News app will have some company.

According to Recode, Google and Twitter are working together to give publishers a better way to display stories on mobile phones. The Recode story cited multiple sources who described a feature that would almost immediately show articles to people who tapped on a link in Twitter or within Google search results.

It’s the companies’ attempt to at solving the impatience problem, the fact that many publishers’ websites load so slowly on mobile devices that readers give up and move on before they get to a story.

The solutions offered by Facebook and Apple is to host publishers’ content on their platforms. Google and Twitter aren’t planning to do that. Instead, readers will be be shown stories from cached pages from publishers’ web sites.

Ads displayed within the original story would also appear in the instant version, which is another difference from the efforts by Apple and Facebook, which both offer publishers 100 percent of revenue generated by ads publishers sell against the hosted content.

The Google-Twitter effort is open source — with the hope that other tech companies will adopt the format — and is expected to launch in the fall with a small group of publishers.

Google and Twitter didn’t respond to our request for comment.