Facebook decided to change the game in how we consume articles by introducing Instant Articles way back in 2015. Instant Articles were a revolution at the time since it cut down loading times to almost an instantaneous level when you read content from your favourite publishers on Facebook.
Not to be outdone, Google also launched their own version of fast loading web-pages, which they called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Thanks to AMP, you can now load webpages from partner publishers when you search for news on Google and it is way faster than loading their actual web pages.
So currently we have multiple formats on reading instantaneous loading articles on the web and Facebook has a solution to this.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook is rolling out support for Google’s AMP and also Apple News as part of their Instant Articles SDK. The SDK will include an extension that will allow its publishers come up with content that will be published on the three platforms.
Apparently the idea for the extension came about from Facebook’s Journalism Project which is the company’s initiative with publishers to seek feedback about upcoming new features on its site.
The new extension that enables this new functionality can be found on Facebook Instant Articles SDK which is available here.
This move by Facebook looks like an attempt to woo back publishers who have been backing out of Instant Articles due to reasons like revenue sharing. Facebook Instant Articles started out as a fresh approach of reading news articles on the web and it is good Facebook is adding support of a competing platform to appease publishers and make it better for readers out there.
