Google says its version of Facebook’s instant articles will arrive early next year

Last month Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, its open-source program designed to make web pages load much more quickly on mobile devices. AMP, which comes in the wake of similar efforts from Facebook and Apple, has been in a technical preview since then. But the first accelerated pages will come “early next year,” the company said in a blog post today. Google says 4,500 developers are following the project on Github, and 250 contributions of code and documentation have been made so far.

The AMP project has attracted publishers including The Guardian, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company. It’s also attracted a number of advertisers; today Google announced that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick, and AdSense are developing ads that conform to the quick-loading specifications of the project. If history is any guide, you can expect those advertisers to push for more intrusive and data-intensive specs over time, until AMP becomes so bloated that it’s nearly as slow as the mobile pages it was designed to replace, and a new initiative is launched to promote even-more-accelerated mobile pages (EMAMP), with the full support of the advertisers who ruined the original project.

Until then, you can sample AMP by tapping this link on a mobile device.