If Facebook hosts news, I'm hiring...

thumbHumans are inherently lazy - and product managers are aware of this.

The swiping motion with which we command our phone screens reduces us to the basest of motor skills we learn virtually at birth, while voice commands have superseded even the remote control as our preferred way to interact with entertainment systems in the home.

I mean, why would I read a whole IKEA instruction manual when I can just watch a video instead? (Just kidding - I don't shop at IKEA).

Facebook, never one to miss a trick where the user experience is concerned, is in talks with media groups about hosting news content within the social network, enabling users to consume entire stories without tapping out to external hosts.

While such an alliance presents obvious gains for Facebook and publishers alike, most of which concern economics and reach, it also throws up plenty of positives for content suppliers and the humble reader too.

As a supplier of branded news, I can see demand for our content growing in-line with audience expectations on the channel and the increased needs of the news outlets we provide to – so more video, more visuals, more copy and more stories in general to meet increased publisher outputs. Happy times.

Additionally, and I may be getting a little ahead of myself here, if Facebook were to pull a Vice and launch a standalone Facebook News sub-brand, then it gives me yet another outlet to sell stories in to and potentially partner with - plus they really don’t come bigger in terms of audience size and segmentation.

Back to the user experience and it’s still good news.

Facebook hosting will make shaping content for social consumption mandatory for publishers, ensuring all outputs are visual, digestible, shareable and mobile – marry this to the convenience of consuming content from multiple outlets in a single space (while also doing all of your social housekeeping) and we could easily save 10-15 minutes a day on our reading time.

Finally, and this is of benefit to reader, platform and content supplier alike, Facebook hosting will lead to deeper engagement and all-round satisfaction – longer reads, greater dwell times, more sharing, increased content performance, happier authors and happier clients.

And for those who fear Facebook dominance, there will always be an alternative – there always is.

Just think of this Facebook/publisher partnership as being one of several labour-saving devices delivered over the years, enabling us to open our ever-expanding daily procrastination window to more cat gifs such as this one and Tinder freaks (I don’t use Tinder).