Facebook Instant Articles offers faster content, interactive reading experience; Rivals Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Pages

By Staff Writer

Oct 22 2015, 08:33 AM EDT

Facebook Instant Articles promises to bring content faster to iOS and Android users and provide an interactive reading experience. It faces rivalry in the form of Google's new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Social media giant Facebook recently launched Instant Articles, the company's native publishing platform, to iOS users. A public beta version of Instant Articles for Android has also been confirmed by the company. Facebook previously conducted beta tests of the feature among iPhone devices.

Facebook is positive that readers will love the Instant Articles feature. According to Facebook Media, Instant Articles offers faster content streaming and an immersive reading experience. It contains active elements to make the content more engaging and seamless for users.

"Instant Articles are simply the articles already in your Facebook News Feed, made faster and more beautiful," says Facebook. To display stories faster than normal articles, the feature removes ads and tracking code that commonly runs on web pages. It includes 3D maps, photos, and other interactive visual elements that can be activated by certain actions like swiping the screen or tilting the device.

Facebook said that instant articles are likely to be shared more than normal articles since they can be viewed faster. The feature would be of great value to publishers since it will get their articles on top of Facebook's news feed.

The Verge reported that the company is said to have new partners that will support the new Instant Articles feature such as: Billboard,Billy Penn, The Blaze, Bleacher Report, Breitbart, Brit + Co, Business Insider, Bustle, CBS News, CBS Sports, CNET, Complex, Country Living, Cracked, Daily Dot, E! News,Elite Daily, Entertainment Weekly, Gannett, Good Housekeeping, Fox Sports, Harper's Bazaar, Hollywood Life, Hollywood Reporter, IJ Review, LittleThings, Mashable, Mental Floss, mindbodygreen, MLB, MoviePilot, NBA, NY Post, The Onion, Opposing Views,People, Pop Sugar, Rare, Refinery 29, Rolling Stone, Seventeen, TIME, Uproxx, US Magazine, USA Today, Variety, The Verge (hey that's us), and The Weather Channel.

In answer to Facebook's Instant Articles, Google released its own publishing platform in the form of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) as per Fast Company's report. Google's head of news and social Richard Gingras said that AMP is all about "making sure the world wide web is not the world wide wait-that's where we're focused."

With Facebook's recent launch of the public beta version of Instant Articles for Android, it is expected that the new feature will be widely available on Android devices later this year. Instant Articles are identified with a lightning bolt icon on the upper right corner.