Linked List: February 10, 2016

Wednesday, 10 February 2016

The Talk Show: ‘Anthropomorphic Human Bowel’ 

New episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with special guest Ben Thompson. Topics include last Sunday’s Super Bowl 50 (and its mostly terrible commercials), Tim Cook’s tweet with a photo he took from the sidelines post-game, Twitter’s algorithmic timeline and the state of today’s Google- and Facebook-dominated online advertising industry, Yahoo’s gloomy prospects, and more.

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Comparing Tech Companies by Revenue and Profit Per Employee, 2015 

Two tweets from Dustin Curtis that tell a big story.

Donald Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal: The Movie’ 

Long-thought lost, but recovered by Ron Howard. Looking forward to watching this tonight.

(Interesting sidenote: “For the best viewing experience, get the Funny Or Die app for Apple TV.”)

Google AMP Launch Looms 

George Slefo, reporting for Advertising Age:

In short, AMP is like a diet version of HTML. It is extremely fast and incredibly quick when it comes to loading. JavaScript is essentially non-existent, for now at least, and images won’t load until they’re in the user’s view. AMP will also deliver content much faster because it will be cached via the cloud, meaning Google won’t have to fetch it from a publisher’s site each time a request is made.

The end result is a near instantaneous content delivery system.

Sounds great.

Come launch, publishers will be able to track analytics and sell ads. Solutions for paywalls were put into place Tuesday. And, crucially, Google will favor AMP sites over others with the same search score in the results it shows consumers, said Richard Gingras, senior director, news and social products at Google.

Hmm.

Update: Rafe Colburn:

Does Google AMP offer any advantage (other than reduced effort) over building something yourself with the same goals as AMP?

What if it doesn’t even involve reduced efforts. What about a site that already delivers clean HTML markup, minimal-to-no JavaScript, and images that load on demand (or, cough, a site with few-to-no images)? Why would Google favor an AMP site over such a site in search results?

Update 2: Ad Age has filed a correction to the story that retracts the claim that Google will favor AMP pages in search results.

Amazon’s Updated AWS Service Terms 

Lengthy, as you’d expect for the terms of service for something like AWS. I’ll simply draw your attention to section 57.10, near the end.