Dive Brief:

• A number of tech companies are offering a version of quick, news articles including Facebook, Apple and Snapchat, and now Google and Twitter are working together to offer mobile users access to publishers' content as well.
• A difference in Google and Twitter’s approach is the publishing project is open source, which could potentially push other tech firms to adopt the developed technology.
• These type of ready-to-view articles are particularly attractive for mobile users because the articles are available almost instantly instead of forcing the user to wait for the publisher’s website to load.

Dive Insight:

Facebook’s Instant Articles feature went live at the end of July, Apple’s own app version of "instant articles," Apple News, rolls out for its U.S. audience with the iOS9 launch on Sept. 16, and even Snapchat offers readers seamless content via its Discover publishers’ portal.

Now, Google and Twitter are joining forces to enter the mobile "instant" content space with a bit of a twist – the publishing platform the two tech giants are creating is an open source project, a move that might entice other tech firms a reason to take part in the project.

Another difference is their iteration will actually be cached snapshots of the original articles from the publishers’ websites, including the ads that ran with the original article. This theoretically makes those ads more valuable and offers marketers more longevity with ads placed on articles that continue to appear on mobile devices as instant articles from Google’s webpage cache.

So far the project is not being branded by Google and Twitter and instead is just referred to as “accelerated mobile pages.”

Having instant access to articles on mobile devices is a benefit for mobile users because otherwise they would have to wait for potentially slow-loading websites before reading articles.