Facebook continues to roll out their Instant Articles format to more publishers. It’s now available to anyone, with this catch:
“You won't be able to publish Instant Articles until your RSS feed has been approved.”
That’s just what we need: the worst part of the App Store approval process applied to the web. No thanks.
Google’s competing Accelerated Mobile Pages has problems too, as I mentioned in the last half of this post about the cost of links. Although unlike Facebook, which wants to trap content behind their own platform, AMP is at least more open and useful to the larger web.
I hate to say it but neither Instant Articles nor AMP are really good enough. I think we need a third standard for super-fast web pages. (Or do we? Maybe the web is okay as-is if we fight page bloat.)
