Facebook has partnered with media publishers across the Asian region. In India it has tied up with AajTak, Hindustan Times, India today, The Indian Express and The Quint. Instant Articles is aimed at allowing publishers to introduce intuitive features like zooming and panning high res pictures by tilting the phone, interactive maps, audio captions and an ability to highlight and comment at individual lines of the article. The news will be pushed on your timeline and Facebook claims that the reading experience will be up to ten times faster than a run of the mill mobile browser. Andy Mitchell’s Blog post quoted him “Expanding Instant Articles to Asia is a significant milestone for the product and for each of our early launch partners.” He further added that “Instant Articles has been designed with extensive feedback from the publishers, and we’re excited to bring this collaboration to our publishing partners in Asia to help them distribute fast, interactive articles to their readers in the Facebook app” If you are a publisher and want to team up with Facebook for Instant Articles all you need to do is fill up this form. However, selection of the publishers is purely based on Facebook’s discretion. That being said all the articles will be pushed right on the Facebook app without needing the readers to install yet another application and this can be a huge plus point for the Instant Articles. The exponential rise in the online content consumption has been driving the companies to come up with innovative and yet utilitarian ways to come up with a content serving app. Instant Articles need to allow a varied genre of publishers in order to serve the readers with the kind of diversity they require.
