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Facebook is bringing Instant Articles to Messenger

The company today announced its integrating its Instant Articles technology right into the app, meaning that you don’t need to open a browser to quickly read breaking news or the viral listicle of the day.

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While many publishers have already jumped on Instant Articles, that doesn’t quite cover everyone, which will lead to some odd discrepancy while clicking links. When bots were first supported in Messenger, publishers like CNN were among the first to build bots to deliver articles to users through the platform. Now, once an article is tapped on, the article will show up within Messenger the same way it does in the normal Facebook app.

It’s definitely good to see Instant Articles, which work much like Google’s own Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Search, make their way from Facebook proper to Messenger.

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Of course, the very concept of Instant Articles is a little controversial. Fortunately, the world’s largest social network is aware of the problem, and just added a new feature that should encourage more users to share their views in private messages, rather than out in the open. Instant Articles were previously limited to the main Facebook app on mobile but they are now available in Facebook Messenger as well.

Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook David Marcus speaks with guests during the 2016 Wired Business Conference