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Last week, Facebook launched Facebook Instant Articles in a partnership with a whole slew of impressive publishers. And if you follow me over at Twitter, you might have seen that I tweeted several not entirely positive tweets about this deal.
But it's so hard to explain something as complex as this in the form of a tweet. More so because my concerns about this are somewhat different from what others are commenting.
Most media people have talked about some dystopian outcome in which Facebook will first lure people over to them, and then cut off the publishers. That's not really what I'm concerned about, though. My concerns are defined by what we are seeing right now, today. And my concern is that publishers seem to suffer from an acute case of Alzheimer's disease, where the main symptoms are memory loss and confusion.
It seems to me that many publishers and media commentators have completely forgotten what Facebook is, how it works, and what it does.
Facebook Instant Articles isn't a new thing at all. We already know how it will work and what you can expect from it. But many publishers seem to have completely unrealistic expectations.
So let's talk about this.
Before we go to the analysis, let's just have a quick look at Facebook Instant Articles, because they are amazingly designed and conceptualized.
The design refreshingly focused on bringing you into the articles in ways that just makes you want to read them. They are filled with interactivity designed to be amazing in a mostly non-interrupting way.
Here is a video presentation: