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Google And Twitter Reportedly Working On Open Source Answer To Facebook Instant Articles

Back in May, Facebook announced Instant Articles, which sees the social network host content from participating publishers in order to show users that content more quickly on mobile devices, saving th...
Google And Twitter Reportedly Working On Open Source Answer To Facebook Instant Articles
Written by Chris Crum
  • Back in May, Facebook announced Instant Articles, which sees the social network host content from participating publishers in order to show users that content more quickly on mobile devices, saving them from having to wait for content to load.

    The result was what some considered a “buttery smooth” content consumption experience.

    Earlier this year, Google and Twitter partnered to start showing a new tweet integration in search results, and now the two companies are teaming up on an answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles, according to a new report from Re/code, citing anonymous sources. They’re doing things a little bit differently, however.

    According to the report, Google and Twitter are creating publishing tools as an open source project with the hopes that other platforms will adopt it. They’re also not actually hosting the content like Facebook is, but rather showing cached “snapshots” of content from publishers’ sites. Peter Kafka and Mark Bergen at Re/code report:

    The idea, according to multiple sources, is that Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately, instead of having to wait several seconds.

    Neither company is commenting on these alleged plans, but you can at least read what Google has to say about cached links here.

    It remains to be seen how well this will work with content that gets updated after its initial publishing, and how quickly Google and Twitter will be able to show the freshest version.

    Another thing that remains unclear is how business terms and ad-related matters will work out for publishers. The first content resulting from the partnership is expected to surface this fall.

    Image via Thinkstock

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