Facebook brings Instant Articles to Messenger

With the success of Facebook’s Instant Articles — which allows for a super-fast experience that gives users immediate access to publisher content — it’s no surprise that the next iteration of Facebook Instant Articles is support for it within direct messages.

The company announced today that Facebook is rolling out Instant Articles to its Messenger platform, beginning with Android and moving to the iPhone shortly thereafter.

The user experience won’t change too drastically — and quite honestly, most won’t even know anything changed. If an article is an Instant Article, users will see the lightning bolt within a link shared on Messenger to indicate that it was an Instant Article that was shared:

Of course, the overall objective of this is to give mobile users an instant user experience when consuming content on Facebook. The social network is confident that the delivery of these articles in this fashion calls for making this feature accessible on all Facebook tools and services where links are shared, and it makes a lot of sense to bring it to a mobile platform where internet access is typically slower. After all, most users will be able to load one of these articles as much as 10 times faster than a web article hosted elsewhere.