How Facebook is eating the internet with good UX

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks during the Facebook F8 Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, March 25, 2015. Photo credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Last year, Facebook began to allow publishers to distribute content directly on their platform, meaning that readers would be able to get their news without having to leave the site. The concept can be seen as yet another example of Facebook eating the internet, since people would no longer have to visit traditional blog sites to read articles — Facebook would have it all.

Improving content on the internet

This isn’t bad at all though . After finding out more about Instant Articles by creating some of my own, I’ve found them to be a great thing for the publishing industry. The bottom line is that Instant Articles create a much better reading experience for users, with potentially great side effects:

• Instant Articles may lead to the promotion of truly quality content that caring authors spend time writing.
• They may lead to a reduction of spammy ‘content marketing’ that dominates the Internet, where we see unoriginal listicles churned out with an underlying purpose of making conversions and sales.

What is an Instant Article?

When I saw Tech in Asia announcing they would now be supporting Instant Articles, I was curious to check it out…

“Read our articles on-the-go lately? Noticed anything different?”

…and I found there was no difference!

Facebook Instant Articles are only available on their mobile app

It never occurred to me that Instant Articles are only available within Facebook’s native app on a mobile device, as I found out when I grabbed my phone. Compare the old experience of a non-Instant Article from the BBC (on the left) with the new Instant Article from Tech in Asia (on the right):

Improving the experience of reading

Cutting out the crap

Design guidelines

The future of publishing