Skip to Content
Silicon Valley

Google wants your e-mails to be a window to the web

February 13, 2018

Your Gmail inbox is about to get weird. As part of an update to its Accelerated Mobile Pages project, Google will serve up content from the internet inside e-mails to provide always-up-to-date information.

Backstory: The AMP project was designed to make web pages load faster, so you could click through from search results to content almost instantly. Now Google wants to do some ... interesting things with the technology.

E-mail plus plus: Developers are going to be playing around with AMP widgets for Gmail messages. The idea: you’ll be able to browse parts of the web—to, say, respond to an invitation, or check if your flight is delayed—without leaving your e-mail. The feature will appear in Gmail later this year.

AMPed news: Google also announced a new Stories format for AMP pages. These Stories are like the image-rich ones found in Snapchat, and will let publishers push nicer-looking, mobile-specific versions of their content to your phone.

Why it matters: It blurs the lines more than ever between different forms of communication, media, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.