Facebook has begun rolling out its Instant Articles feature to Android phones in India, the company told LiveMint yesterday. Instant Articles is a service wherein publishers allow Facebook to publish their entire content on the platform, and is loaded within the app itself. This gives Facebook control of the environment in which it is read, and optimise it for faster consumption. Websites usually have badly optimised javascript with external plugins that slow them down, as a compromise for features being served to readers. The five publishers are India Today, The Quint, Aaj Tak, Hindustan Times and the Indian Express. Among these, it's worth pointing out that the India Today group, which owns India Today and Aaj Tak, was also a part of Facebook's Internet.org service, the last time Facebook released its list of partners. Like Facebook, Twitter also loads news (albeit sporadically) from publications within its own application. However, it does this without giving publishers the ability to opt out: this robs publishers of the option of monetizing views on their own platform, and is thus akin to stealing content. MediaNama's take: Feeding the beast Bait and switch is not something new to Facebook: platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter focus on first helping build massive fragmentation, to build a mass audience and user base, and become the aggregators of this fragmentation. Once there is sufficient fragmentation in the market, it will be difficult for them to exit it, because it remains their key mode of monetization online. We've…
