<div><strong>Mala Bhargava</strong><br><br>Facebook wants it all. Search, photos, videos, shopping, and of course, news. A lot of news content and articles are already extensively shared on Facebook via publishers’ pages and users’ posts, but Facebook has decided to collect it all its own aggregation – where it has control over everything. Publishers are a little stuck. If they stay out, they stand not to gain new readers. If they hop on board, they bow to Facebook’s control – which means anything can be changed any time, as even regular users are well aware.</div><div> </div><div>The articles, from publishers with whom Facebook has signed up, will appear in Facebook’s app. Instant Articles was already available for iOS devices, and now it has arrived on the Android app and specifically for India. Facebook has 130 million users in India and Mark Zuckerberg is extremely keen on getting his next chunk of users from India, that being the country that will make for the next surge of user growth for the social network in any case.</div><div> </div><div>Instant Articles is free and is being gradually rolled out to users in India and then other locations in the world. You can read the articles available within the feature anywhere else, of course, but here they are beautifully formatted and are supposed to load fast. They’re also interactive and you can zoom into photos which you can tilt to see more details and listen to accompanying audio captions. Video is also on the platform and you can zoom into maps as well.</div><div> </div><div>To begin with, Facebook has Quint, <em>Hindustan Times, Indian Express</em>, Aaj Tak and<em> India Today </em>on board with their content. This list will be expanding soon.</div><div> </div><div>For publishers, the tools are difficult to resist, as is the ease of uploading content to Instant Articles. But this isn’t the first time Facebook has tried aggregating news articles. Using a property they called Paper, Facebook tried to get users to flock to this special site for news, but it didn’t work. This time, Facebook has a much richer platform and of course, lots more technology has gone into it to ensure a better experience. Whether users will take to it, we will soon see. But according to the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, the imitative doesn’t allow a lot of advertising to fit in and isn’t bringing in a lot of money for publishers, when tested in the United States.</div>
