Google’s AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages – is framework developed by Google that aims to be the de facto open standard for publishing pages for mobile devices. This is a publishing technology that allows developers to create pages that load almost instantly on mobile devices. Since its launch in 2016, over 25 million domains have published more than 1.5 billion AMP pages.
So, what does Accelerated Mobile Pages have to do with email?
Google is looking to take AMP one step forward (or is it one step back, for us consumers). The company published on a blog post the preview of AMP for email. While this may seem an odd idea at first, Google focus on all the advantages their frameworks could add to email.
“For or example, imagine you could complete tasks directly in email. With AMP for Email, you’ll be able to quickly take actions like submit an RSVP to an event, schedule an appointment, or fill out a questionnaire right from the email message.” wrote Aakash Sahney, Google’s Product Manager for Gmail and Chat platforms. “Many people rely on email for information about flights, events, news, purchases and beyond—more than 270 billion emails are sent each day! AMP for Email will also make it possible for information to easily kept up-to-date, so emails never get stale and the content is accurate when a user looks at it.”
What AMP in emails means to us?
The email service is one of the oldest on the Internet, and basically consists in sending plain text messages back and forth. It was invented in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson, predating the invention of the World Wide Web by almost two decades, and hasn’t evolved much since.
The email contents are simple, and even while adding a bit of HTML to it hasn’t changed it much. So, why to focus on email?
Google’s entire business model is based in offering free services, while delivering paid Ads to the users of such services, and extracting informations from users with trackers.
An obfuscated model
Ads and trackers capture data about the viewer, the contents their watching, and according to some sources, Google even scans the contents of your emails to feed its Artificial Intelligence algorithms with more information about you, and how to influence your decision making.
Do emails really need to feed off from a remote server and dynamically update their content? We don’t think so.
No one is giving nothing for free. Google is a multi-million dollar company that capitalizes aggressively the information it extracts from its users. And that is the only motive to reinvent email.
