TheOverAnalyzed

Instant Articles ¶

Facebook recently announced Instant Articles, a method by which Facebook users in the iPhone app can view published articles without the typical waiting time associated with page loading. Want to read something in the app? Easy. Tap the article and it loads instantly. This is in contrast to the typical behavior of most apps with a third-party browser, in which tapping on the article launches the browser, and then the user has to wait for the browsers to load the article.

Facebook In General ¶

I hate Facebook. I really do. I was the guy who was too cool for Facebook in 2012, right around the time when most of my friends thought it was still a legitimate way to connect with other people.^[1] I cringed when Facebook bought Instagram. I get anxious every time I hear Ben Thompson talk about Facebook’s astonishing continued pervasiveness and relevance.

I don’t want Facebook to live on.

I want it to die.

But you know what? I don’t think it will, at least not anytime soon. While it has long been dead to technophiles and teenyboppers alike, the simple truth is that social media is an absolute necessity for publishers to survive. Why is that?

No One Visits Websites Anymore ¶

As Marco Arment said on the latest episode of his Accidental Tech Podcast:

The web as viewed in web browsers […] is losing relevance

Not the internet, but the web [emphasis added]

Marco is spot-on here. And because less and less normal people use web browsers to read website content, publishers are in trouble.

Here’s John Gruber’s short take:

HTML/CSS/JavaScript rendered in a web browser — that part of the web has peaked.

Without those little Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Whatever share icons below articles, publishers’ content would never see the light of day (relatively speaking). Their articles have to have a social presence to gain popularity. In these troubled times of the web, publishers have to embrace Facebook if they want to remain relevant.

And with Instant Articles, Facebook just might have pushed publishers to a decision. “Poop or get off the pot,” the saying goes. Adapt or give up.

Instant Articles: The Good ¶

Perhaps I have doomsday’d the situation prematurely. I haven’t delineated the actual good that Instant Articles can provide to content consumers. And there is some legitimate cause for celebration.

Presumably, Facebook is doing something similar to what Google does with search results in Chrome: upon returning a search query, Chrome will have already pre-loaded in the background the top result for the query. Thus, when the user selects the top link in the list, the browser can load the hyperlinked content much snappier than if Chrome hadn’t preloaded the content.

If Facebook is doing this, bravo. While not an entirely innovative concept, it is somewhat surprising other platforms^[2] haven’t done something similar. Imagine if Twitter Cards contained pre-loaded versions of the linked content, less than a second away from entertaining the user. That would certainly cut down on my tendency to just auto-save everything to Instapaper.^[3]

M.G. Siegler agrees:

With Instant Articles, Facebook has not only done a 180 from what Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s biggest mistake, they’ve now done another lap just to prove a point. Not only is the web not fast enough for apps, it’s not fast enough for text either.

And you know what, they’re right.

Yes, native apps have spoiled us. But such spoilage is natural. In the end, all that matters is user experience. Native apps provide a better user experience on mobile than a web browser. That was true five years ago, that’s true today. And I suspect it will still be true five years from now.

In a way, it’s the publishers’ own fault that Instant Articles are even a threat in the first place. If publishers would quit with all the bloat-inducing ‘me-too’ JavaScript and complex CSS, pages would likely load closer to 0.8 seconds instead of 8 seconds—a Facebook statistic noted by OM Malik. Indeed:

Facebook is right: Most of these pages take way too long to load.

Instant Articles: The Bad ¶

As Instant Articles takes off due to increased adoption by publishers, those publishers not on board might feel backed into a corner. Compete or be forgotten. Worse yet, Facebook might become the only platform onto which publishers can push content that actually gets consumed.

Facebook First ¶

Remember “Mobile first,” the internet buzzword a few years ago? One aspect of Mobile first was an initiative for publishers to restructure their websites to look and function better on mobile devices. This “Responsive Design” dropped many of the heavy-handed, desktop-focused content arrangements of old, and in their place, simpler designs were featured instead.^[4] Traditionally, developers and designers would make their website pretty and optimize it for desktop, and then make the necessary device-specific style changes to mobile applications. Mobile first literally meant that publishers and developers should consider their work on mobile devices first, and then apply specific ‘web-browser’ design to desktop versions of their projects (this is where @media queries came from).

With Instant Articles, publishers will have to submit to Facebook before all other platforms, including their own. If what’s blowing in the wind is true, Instant Articles will be the nail in the coffin for old-school web publishing. Content producers will be forced to ensure that whatever they put out, it conforms to the format Instant Articles prefers. The last thing publishers want is for Instant Articles to mis-parse their content, potentially costing publishers tons of ad revenue, and, more importantly, running the risk that consumers spoiled on Instant Articles might not want to wait for their ‘non-Instant Articles-optimized’ content to load. Maybe those readers will opt to read an article by a competing publisher, one that loads in less than a second (since it had been optimized for Instant Articles)?

Publishers not on-board with Instant Articles might be forgotten along with the web as we know it. This is a problem for the same reasons that spurred the necessity for net neutrality. If Facebook is the only player in the published content game, it can leverage its grasp on the market and do real harm to consumers. Yes, users’ content might load super fast from the Instant Articles in the Facebook app compared to a publisher’s web page, but how will those users know when they have missed out on a thoughtful blog post from Brent Simmons? As an indie blogger, he likely has neither the reach nor the scratch to get promoted in Instant Articles.

If Instant Articles takes off, its genuine technical utility will be dwarfed by it’s tendency to prioritize the bigger publishing companies over the small-timers. That’s not good.

The Times, They Are A-Changin’ ¶

The aforementioned Facebook first dystopia can be just as bad as a world without net neutrality. I cannot overemphasize this point.

That said, there is another reason publishers might lament Instant Articles. And that is because publishers will be forced to change the way they create their content.

Instead of focusing their energies on writing worthwhile content for the web, publishers might be feel pressure to increase the amount of listicles and or clickbait-y headline articles. I can’t imagine Ars Technica ever being more proud of a ‘10 Best Apple Watch Apps’ listicle than the thoughtful content they actually produce regularly.

But with Instant Articles, Ars might have to rethink their publishing scheme. And as the ratio of dumb to thoughtful articles increases, the amount of thoughtful readership is bound to change inversely. That’s also not good.

Although somewhat silly to think so, I consider myself a de facto web publisher. And thus, I include myself in the group of publishers that might have to make a change. Does this mean TheOverAnalyzed will start to feature ‘10 Best’ type articles, or buzz worthy headlines like “How To Steal An Apple Watch”? No.

TheOverAnalyzed and Instant Articles ¶

However, I will do something.

Today I reactivated my long dormant Facebook profile so that I could create a Facebook page for TheOverAnalyzed.^[5] I wanted to get ahead of this Instant Articles thing, and wanted to make sure that my content was getting to readers in the manner that best speaks to them. As quick as my website is at loading, I don’t want to bank on that being the only method people chose to access my content. If my website loses relevancy, at least my words might not. That’s far more important to me.

Interestingly, Facebook kindly sent their rejection:^[6]

So, I patiently await my opportunity to climb aboard the train I wish had never left the station. Three years after leaving Facebook, I’m back. And it’s not because I value the social network of moms. No, I’m back because I’m afraid. Like the rest of the publishers out there, I’m scared that in a Facebook first world, publishing outside of Facebook’s Instant Articles-optimized ecosystem will be like marketing an app on Cydia instead of the App Store. Yes, there may be a market for jailbroken apps, but it pales in comparison to the true application store on iOS. Likewise, while my true fans might still check my website or RSS feed for content, without Instant Articles support, the more casual chunk of my readership might not even know I exist.