Facebook rolls out Instant Articles feature to all iOS users

All iPhone users can now choose to read from among the thousands of news articles posted everyday on their Facebook app. The social networking giant has rolled out its native publishing platform in a big way.

Making the “Instant Articles” feature available to all iOS users will help Facebook come-up with more dynamic, immersive and interactive content. It will connect readers to stories faster and provide a richer reading experience.

“When a friend or publisher shares a link on Facebook, the enhanced experience is displayed automatically if an Instant Article version is available. Instant Articles are simply the articles already in your Facebook News Feed, made faster and more beautiful,” says Michael Reckhow, Product Manager at Facebook in a blog post .

All iOS users will see lightning bolt at the top right corner of a few new stories indicating it’s an Instant Article. Instant Articles will load ten times faster than the standard mobile web article, says Facebook. The beta testing phase revealed the enhanced experience enabled users to share Instant Articles more often than regular web articles.

Articles that are shared more are positioned higher in the News Feed, in turn helping publishers reach a larger audience. Later this year, Facebook will launch the service for Android devices with public beta available from this week.

Major publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, NBC News, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan and many more already post thousands of Instant Articles each day.

In the coming weeks, users can expect more articles from Billboard, Billy Penn, Business Insider, CNET, Mashable, TIME, USA Today, Variety and The Verge among the slew of new publishers who agreed to support the new format. In a similar vein, Google recently introduced an open-source format for its Accelerated Mobile Pages in collaboration with Twitter.

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