One of the features of Facebook for mobile is that it supports Instant Articles, which are basically links to webpages that load instantly. Google has their own answer to Instant Articles in the form of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which the company has been pushing more aggressively in recent times.Now it seems that Google is bringing AMP to Google+, kind of like what Facebook has done with Instant Articles. However in Google’s case, AMP will be available in the mobile browser version of Google+, not within the actual Google+ app itself. This means that if you are browsing Google+ on your phone using Chrome or another browser, you can expect to find AMP pages being compatible with the social networking platform.
All you’ll have to do is keep an eye out for the little lightning bolt icon next to the link to know that it is an AMP-friendly website. According to Google, “Now when you browse G+ on the Web on your phone, look for the little lightning bolt icon to load articles up to 4x faster, using up to 10x less data. Enjoy, and stay tuned as we add support for more platforms and publishers in the near future.”
Of course whether or not websites take advantage of AMP is an entirely different story, but so far we are starting to see a fair bit of adoption (Ubergizmo is also AMP-friendly, by the way!) so hopefully more publishers and developers get on board with it in the future.