Facebook for iPhone gets new fast-loading Instant Articles

Instant Articles load 10 times faster and provide the user with an enriched reading experience

The Instant Articles offer a much better-looking reading experience

If you've noticed articles on Facebook loading a little quicker recently, that's because the new Instant Articles have been launched to all iPhone users this week.

Instant Articles load up to 10 times quicker than a regular article, and have some enriched features - such as unobtrusive autoplay videos, zoomable high-definition images and interactive maps.

You can tell when you see an Instant Article by the small lightning bolt in the top right corner of the article image - however, this doesn't display for all of them, so you might get a surprise as more and more publishers adopt the feature.

As Facebook puts it, "Instant Articles are simlpy the articles already in your Facebook News Feed, made faster and more beautiful."

A host of websites, such as The Guardian, Buzzfeed and The New York Times have started using Instant Articles, and they're likely to become more common as time goes on.

The full roll-out is only on iPhone at the moment, but Facebook says they're launching the Android version later this year.

Facebook's been selling the idea to publishers by saying users are more likely to share Instant Articles, thus increasing the publisher's ranking in Facebook's News Feed.

With the vast majority of social traffic coming through Facebook, many publishers are scrambling to get on board with the new product.

And as more and more people use their mobiles to access the internet (around half of some publishers' pageviews come from mobile at times), a nice-looking and fast-loading article layout that people want to share is an attractive prospect.

Most importantly for Facebook, however, they stand to make money. The company takes a cut of the money from ads that publishers put in these instant articles, and it keeps users on Facebook.

Rather than opening up a mini-browser that people could wander off in, Instant Articles allow Facebook to keep users inside its system - anyone who's read about Facebook's plans for the Messenger app will know that dominating as much of people's online lives as possible is Facebook's long-term goal.

Time will tell whether readers embrace instant articles in their current form, or whether they end up losing their novelty. Enjoy seeing your articles load quicker in the meantime.