Ondrej Holzman Facebook is heading to iPhones with another application, the popular social network has just introduced paper, an application for discovering and viewing new and interesting content. Paper serves both to view news and completely overhauls the look of the News Feed on Facebook...
Paper is the first application born from Facebook Creative Labs, an initiative within Facebook that allows small teams to act as startups and create independent mobile apps. The Paper app is said to have taken several years to develop and will be available for download on February 3rd, the day before Facebook's tenth birthday.
The new app will display content from a total of 19 different sections, such as sports, technology, culture, etc., with each user choosing the news they want to read. Of course, Paper will also be connected to Facebook and offers a completely new perspective for viewing its content.
It was Facebook's intention that the way of viewing this social network in the new application differed from the previous practices. Content comes first in Paper, and at first glance you don't even need to recognize that it's a Facebook app. At the same time, at first glance, Paper may remind you of the popular application Flipboard, from which Menlo Park certainly drew inspiration, both in terms of graphics and functionality. The fact that great emphasis is placed on the content itself is evidenced by the absence of various buttons that could distract attention. Most of the time, gestures are all you need. It doesn't even interfere with the upper status bar in iOS, which Paper overlays.
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Paper's main screen is divided into two parts - the top one shows large photos and videos that you can flick through, and the bottom one shows statuses and stories. When you tap on a photo or message, it expands with a cute animation and you can comment on that image or status just like you were used to on Facebook.
But it's not just a different look at the main social network feed. Added value comes with adding the aforementioned sections to your reader. News and stories are added to each section in two ways - firstly by Facebook employees themselves and secondly by a special algorithm that selects content based on various rules. In Paper, Facebook does not want to offer only "sloppy" articles from the biggest websites, but also to draw attention to previously unknown bloggers, present alternative opinions, etc. In the future, Paper also wants to offer each user tailor-made content, for example, to display more information about their favorite sports club. However, currently all users will receive the same content.
Creating your own posts is also very interesting in Paper. These will then not only appear in Paper, but of course also on your Facebook profile, so your friends can view it from all other devices. However, Paper offers an elegant counter to them WYSIWYG editor that instantly shows you what your post will look like.
On February 3, Paper will be revealed only and exclusively for iPhone, Facebook will not inform about a possible version for iPad or Android. At the same time, Paper should only be available in the United States, but the question remains whether this means a restriction only to the App Store there, or that the application will not work at all outside the US territory. However, the first option is more likely.
fields on the main screens of iPhones, however, it is possible that instead Paper will replace the existing client for Facebook, because viewing the statuses and photos of your friends could be much more fun with Paper.
Hmm. Interesting :) nicely "extracted" appliqué both in terms of code and marketing :). I'll try
it looks awesome!
It's just a shame that they don't give the same care to the Facebook app. :-/
It looks very nice. Like Apple used to do it in the old days.
I wish an RSS reader looked like this.
So will the app be available or not? She is quite attractive :-)