We’ve just published updates to the AMP Roadmap — please check them out!
Here is a summary across the focus areas:
Format
A few weeks ago, we announced the beta for <amp-live-list> and development work is complete. This feature will be vital for publishers looking to launch liveblog experiences using AMP. We anticipate upgrading the feature to stable status within August.
With opportunities ahead for growing the AMP format for e-commerce experiences, we’ve been engaging with the AMP community to outline use cases and build features to enable e-commerce in AMP. The roadmap reflects several initiatives tying in with this effort, including support for <form>, support for a component that would enable product image galleries, and various <amp-analytics> improvements detailed below.
Finally, we’re working on several projects that will enable AMPs to be more beautiful and engaging experiences. We’ll soon ship improvements to the <amp-carousel> component to have better scrolling performance and we’re also just beginning work to enhance <amp-lightbox>. We want to make video awesome on AMP pages and in platform experiences where users discover video content. To achieve this, we’re planning several enhancements, including muted autoplay support and the ability to load AMP pages in a video viewing mode. We’ll also begin to work on introducing a set of out-of-box styling and templates for AMPs.
Analytics
To enhance the core of amp-analytics, we shipped support for a “hidden” event and element-level data variables. Each of these enhancements, coming to stable builds of AMP within August, should enable publishers to build greater awareness of users’ behaviors on AMP pages.
A/B-style content experimentation support has been a long-standing feature request. We’ve recently completed the code for <amp-experiment>, which offers client-side traffic diversion and variation, and integrates with <amp-analytics>. This feature should be launched within August.
Finally, we’d like to improve analytics support in AMP for a couple of key focus areas mentioned above, video and e-commerce, through the introduction of new triggers, variables, and ways of passing data to analytics.
Ads
Since our previous update, we launched sticky ads and flying carpet formats. We also worked on building a lot of the infrastructure required to serve AMP Ads for AMP Pages (A4A).
This quarter, we announced the AMP for Ads (A4A) initiative and expect to deliver A4As via supported ad servers. We are also releasing a format spec for A4A to ensure ads can render quickly and smoothly in the browser and do not degrade a site’s user experience. We’d like to focus on making A4A work in non-AMP pages as well, which will allow advertisers and publishers to build a creative once and deploy to any inventory. Enabling as much A4A creative demand as possible across the advertiser and publisher ecosystem is critical to ensuring overall success of the initiative. To that end, we’re working with creative agencies to build creatives in A4A and auto-convert creatives to A4A when possible.
Finally, we plan to improve the ad loading user experience in AMP through a couple specific projects: displaying a better ad loading indicator and showing a default fallback when no ad is available to serve.
Access
Working towards the goal of enabling seamless access to subscription content in AMP, the team has been developing a general framework for allowing an AMP viewer to help the user sign-in to the publisher of the AMP document. We are working on a prototype that should be ready soon, and look forward to engaging with the community to bring it to market. We are brainstorming ways to use the same general approach to open up user experiences with publisher content that requires signed in usage.
On the AMP Access server-side support front, we needed to switch gears and explore a new approach, so we are prototyping a solution that should be available by end of Q3. Many thanks to the publisher partners who are helping us test the approach.
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As always, please let us know if you have any feedback.
Posted by Vamsee Jasti, Product Manager, AMP Project