Your favorite articles could start looking different on Facebook. Today, the company unveiled Facebook Instant, a solution for publishers to create interactive content for Facebook’s mobile audience that’s beautiful and loads quickly.
Right now, the average article you click from Facebook’s app takes eight seconds to load — an eternity in mobile years. Google found many users click away after only 400 milliseconds of a loading delay, so you can only imagine how often people are attempting to read, and quickly abandoning, articles from Facebook’s apps. This is problematic for Facebook (which wants to keep you in its ecosystem for as long as possible) and for publishers (who want your eyeballs on their content).
In addition to being speedier, Instant also makes these articles more visually appealing, with full-screen images that you can explore by tilting your phone and auto-play videos that engage as you scroll downwards. With Instant, publishers create posts using their own technologies, and then Facebook transforms those stories to be compatible with its app.
One other very interesting feature of Facebook Instant: the ability to like and comment on individual parts of an article in-line. You see people do this on Twitter all the time, posting a screenshot of a paragraph or highlighted text (a trend called screenshorting)……
See full story on refinery29.com
Photo: courtesy facebook