Facebook Instant Articles now open to all publishers

Facebook yesterday made good on its announcement to throw open its Instant Articles format to all publishers. The format allows publishers to show Facebook  mobile users a fast-loading and mostly distraction-free view of their posts.

At the same time the users also get to see limited versions of their ads and publishers can measure pageviews through tools like Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, comScore and others. The format until now was only available to select publishers.

Instant Articles is basically an HTML5 document that uses a couple of specific tags to which publishers can add text and images, slideshows, audio captions, maps, video and also support for Facebook likes and comments.

''Facebook's goal is to connect people to the stories, posts, videos or photos that matter most to them,'' the company says.

''Opening up Instant Articles will allow any publisher to tell great stories, that load quickly, to people all over the world. With Instant Articles, they can do this while retaining control over the experience, their ads and their data.''

According to the company, adoption had been ''tremendous'' with more than 1,000 publishers worldwide. ''We see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook,'' wrote product manager Josh Roberts.

Furthermore, Facebook has added new partners and tools, which include integrations with WordPress, Medium, RebelMouse, ShareThis, Sovrn, Tempest, Adobe Analytics, Chartbeast, Nielsen, Parsely, and SimpleReach.

According to Facebook, mobile users were opening and sharing Instant Articles more frequently than mobile web articles and were less likely to abandon such articles before they loaded.

With the Instant Articles program publishers can post entire articles on Facebook itself, rather than posting links that drove mobile users back to their own websites.

The social network also announced a new chat bot feature with which publishers and other companies would be able to create ''bots'' that automatically interacted with users of its Messenger product. A user would need to first message a publisher, say with a news topic, and they might receive a reply with links to relevant content, for instance.