Instant Article offers faster load time and instant image delivery
By Dileep Thekkethil
Facebook, partnering with five Indian publishers, launched its Instant Article feature for Android users in India. Facebook had officially launched the Instant Article tool for iPhones back in October and since then has been testing the android version to leverage the reach to millions of Android-Facebook users.
Using the new feature of Facebook, Indian android users can read thousands of regional articles made available by the publishers who have already partnered with Facebook. Currently in India, Facebook has partnered with leading media publishers such as India Today, The Quint, Aaj Tak, Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express. In a global level, Facebook has teamed up with New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, Bild, Huffington Post, Vox Media, and several more to make articles easily accessible.
The new feature will be available in the top right corner of the some stories shared in News Feed. The lightning bolt symbol on the top right corner of stories shared in News Feed is an indication of an Instant Article.
According to Facebook, the publishers who partner with the company can put their content directly in Facebook enabling faster load time and instant image delivery. According to Facebook, the Instant Article feature will boost the load time of articles ten times faster than a standard mobile web article, providing users a seamless reading experience.
Check out this short video to see what Instant Articles look like. We hope you love it as much as we do.
https://vimeo.com/127539718
Instant Article is a very handy tool for publishers as they can disseminate stories quickly to the readers with rich media content getting cached as the user reads stories; this gives a smooth reading experience to users even on a 2G network.
On the flip side, people who are skeptical of the growing influence of Facebook believe that the Instant Article feature will give more gatekeeping rights to the internet giant. It has also resulted in the restart of discussion regarding net neutrality and openness and fairness.
India is the second largest market for Facebook after the US. The importance Facebook gives to India has been visible in many instances and the introduction of Instant Article for Android platform is seen as one such.
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg had visited IIT-Delhi and slammed those who protest the services offered by Internet.org initiative.
“Net neutrality is an important principle. We do a lot to support it, both in terms of pushing for regulation that kind of enables this, and in our own work – building an open platform that any developer can build something for regardless of who they are, as long as they follow the basic rules of what Internet.org is,” he said while answering a question.
He also added “There have been a lot of stories over here in India that suggest that what we’re trying to do with Internet.org is just have a small set of Internet services that people can use, and somehow make it so people can’t have access to the rest. That really couldn’t be further from the truth.”