Facebook Instant Articles: A Slippery Slope

FB's Instant Articles are very disturbing to me.

The reason is that it is of vital importance to any business that has a website, to have live human visitors to their own website. Not so they can click ads, but so that the visitors will provide organic links.

If the NYT publishes an article about Strawberry Jam on FB, and the WSJ publishes an article about peanut butter on FB, I might link to a FB friend's sandwich recipe. That will result in an incremental boost to FB's prosperity.

If instead the NYT publishes that article on its own website, I might link to an article on the nytimes.com website. That will boost NYT's prosperity an increment, but not Facebook's.

It is for this same reason that I will never publish a Mac OS X app on the App Store. To self-publish an iOS App requires that the user jailbreak their device. I see both sides of the argument but on the whole I am not inclined to publish iOS Apps in the App Store either.

Consider that after many years of pressure, Apple is finally permitting the developers to have analytics on their own apps.

What they are not permitting, is for developers to publish iOS apps on their own websites. Just now it occurred to me, if Apple really has some good reason to insist on controlling what apps may be installed on iDevices, why not just supply a signature on the app installer - the .apk IIRC - then send the app installer back to the developer?

Doesn't this sound like they're attempting to take traffic (and revenue) away from other publishers? If you can read the articles on Facebook, why would you want to go to a different website to read the same thing (obviously loyal users won't leave)... Just seems like Facebook is trying to become a news organization vs a social network.