Facebook once again is announcing a new innovation of its online services. The social networks Instant Articles section is getting an upgrade. Readers can now get a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of images and videos on publisher’s content. Publishers can now make their content more appealing by adding these 360 images. Readers can simply click and drag these photos to get a more realistic experience. The social networking mogul had just announced this enhancement today.
The 360 technology is not really new to the social network. Facebook had already started the ball rolling on these types of images and videos on their news feed since June last year. This method allows readers of content enjoy different views of an image. It gives them a more natural view of the image. They now have the chance to enjoy a true-to-life of a beautiful scenery from halfway across the globe simply by just using their laptops and mobile devices.
360 images had been around Facebook for quite some time now. They had been showing up on people’s news feeds. To enjoy the view on these images, one only need to move their device to change their perspective of the image. On a desktop, clicking or dragging the image with the mouse will change the view.
It is not only Facebook who had embraced 360 images. In fact, these images are already observable in the news media. NBC and Vice are two of the pioneers in this content publishing technology. The United States’ space agency, NASA, also employs this 360-imaging technology.
This time, Facebook is giving journalists the opportunity to produce attractive content. They will now be able to incorporate 360 videos and photographs into their writeups to make it more appealing to the audience. Readers can now interact with their articles.
USA Today had also tried putting these 360 technologies on their own content publishing platform prior to Facebook’s announcement. A 360-video featuring a narration of a tour around U.S. national parks was published by the said online news agency. The German news agency published a news article featuring a 360-video tour inside the USS Harry S. Truman.
All these 360-images as well as videos are available on Facebook’s Instant Articles. This feature is indeed very helpful for content publishers in attracting more visitors to their pages and gaining popularity. However, there is a problem with the visibility of these images in other platforms. These images eat up a lot of bandwidth which could possibly cause latency in the transmission of data on the publisher’s site.
This, however, is not a problem on Facebook’s Instant Articles. Yet, even though most people prefer to read news on Facebook, content publishers still need to ensure that their own websites remain functioning well.
