Facebook has finally announced the much anticipated Instant Articles, where Facebook actually hosts the content of newspapers (selected ones for now), instead of providing links that take you to the newspapers’ websites. There’s a lot of pointless navel-gazing in the Media industry, but I’ll not get into that. This post is simply from the user’s perspective.
Partial Feeds
It may not seem like it, but the problem that gave birth to Facebook articles –namely that it takes forever to load an article from inside facebook– is an old one. Back when people still used RSS readers, there was one thing that many people agreed on: We hate partial feeds. Partial feeds are when a media entity decides to only publish a post title on their RSS feeds, and if they’re generous, they include a small except. It was maddening, having to leave the fast and cozy confines of our RSS reader to click on the link and go to the original website, which invariably felt like it took forever to load (especially on mobile!).
Fast forward to facebook, our defacto news feed, and we notice that news links (title, excerpt and image with a link to the article’s website) are very similar to partial RSS feeds in the annoyance factor. With the new instant articles, Facebook is effectively introducing us to Facebook’s equivalent of full feeds, where you read your story then and there. It won’t be long for people to notice the huge difference in usability and will only start clicking on instant stories.
What Could have been
I can’t help but imagine a parallel world in which RSS was not a geek-only technology, where Media companies realized back then that they could provide full feeds, embed their ads in the body of their articles, and they’d be exactly where they are today, with one crucial difference: Their destiny would not be in the hand of one big technology company.
The post From A User’s Perspective, Facebook Instant Articles are a Big Deal appeared first on Mustapha Hamoui's Geek Blog.
