Wow, I guess this is what FOMO looks like when taken to the b2c megacorp level.
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.
An interesting hot take I read a while back (that I can't find) was that Google's strategy is generally "compete with every company on every product in order to build a moat, so that no one can touch search, which is the actual castle." And if you think about it makes a lot of sense -- Google competes with almost every other tech company on something, but no one competes with Google on search. The exception, perhaps, is voice search where Alexa / Siri are truly competitive.
Amazon has been aggressively eating into Google's search advertising market share, which is actually the biggest threat to Google's model today (aside from general obsolescence as activity drifts away from the open web).
And this seems to be about providing Google-only search result content that no competitor could equal since it's literally built on google's tech, RE: "Your story can then be surfaced in relevant Google Search results and Discover."
Interestingly. There's bound to be more people using Bing in the Silicon Valley bubble than outside it. This is because duckduckgo, the famed privacy focused search engine uses Bing as the back end.
I use Bing... sometimes. They literally give you rewards points (that can be redeemed for Microsoft/Xbox gift cards) for searching. Pretty funny, the lengths they go to get you to use Bing...
The non-cynical take is that "stories" is the first content format since the "feed" that is really sticky and opens a new avenue for user interaction. Everyone is adopting them because is now clear that it's not a fad.
Consumers understand the concept of stories and actually engage heavily with them so nobody wants to miss out.
Of course not all the implementations are good or useful, but from a user interaction perspective the functionality is becoming so widely familiar that it makes sense why everyone is adopting this format.
I don't think the fact everyone is adopting them makes it not a fad. People have jumped on a lot of fads over the years. Hell, even animated gifs are losing a lot of popularity now; can you imagine thinking that 10y ago?
More importantly, this is still driven by one or two big players using this format. If those players decide to innovate with the format, it could radically alter how people feel about it and it could lose in popularity, or it could change enough that Google's implementation becomes irrelevant unless they alter it significantly as well (which then gives more work downstream, which could make publishers stop bothering with it if they ever did).
This feels super fragile and tbh looks more like a desperate play from Google than an adoptive one.
In fact, you know what an adoptive one would look like to me? Having google start seriously indexing stories and be able to show them in rich media results.
I think the difference is: one approach is ad driven, one is search driven.
When the discussion thread abounds with people who have no idea what this "stories" concept is about, and none of them seem to care to find out,... that's the first hint that you might want to question some of your assumptions.
> It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it’ll fail just as badly.
It feels a lot more like it is AMP all over again (because it is literally AMP). And I don’t recall that failing.
AMP is the Google thing it is trendy to complain about taking over, as opposed to almost everything else, where it is trendy to complain about it imminently failing.
It feels like a safe bet that this is Google+ all over again, and it'll fail just as badly. But hey, set a 5 year reminder and I'll happily take the "I was wrong" on this if I indeed am.