The social network intends to announce the
app on Thursday, although it will not actually be available for download
from Apple’s App Store until Monday. Initially it will be available
only to users in the United States.
Unlike the regular Facebook mobile app, the
new app does away with buttons, menus and other distractions. The focus
is on making it easy to consume content. Everything appears full screen
and you move around the app by swiping or pinching the screen.
Fire it up, and you see the updates from your
news feed, one at a time. Photos of wide scenes like the Grand Canyon
expand beyond the screen, with a tilt or twist of the phone allowing you
to change your perspective to see other parts of the image. Videos
start playing automatically. Longer posts appear in one scrollable
chunk.
Beyond your feed, you can drill down into
topics like headlines, the planet, creators and cute animals, where you
will see stories and visuals selected by Facebook’s algorithms as well
as a handful of human editors. Some come from content partners, like
CNN, National Geographic and The New York Times, which have optimized
the look of their material on the app. Other articles are drawn from
posts that have been made publicly on the service, such as artists’
photos of their work or posts by celebrities.
“It’s a new way to browse stories from your
friends, find topics you care about and share stories with your
friends,” said Michael Reckhow, the Facebook product manager overseeing
the project, in an interview. “We hope that this helps to connect people
directly to the source of the content.”
As a bonus for users, there are no ads.
Paper, which has been under development for
the past year, is the latest addition to Facebook’s family of
single-purpose apps, which includes Messenger for instant messaging and
Instagram for sharing photos and videos.
“One of the things we want to do over the
next few years is build a handful of these great, new experiences,” Mark
Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said Wednesday while discussing
the company’s fourth-quarter financial results.
Visually, Paper resembles the cover screen of
Facebook Home, the software overlay introduced last year that could
effectively turn an Android phone into a Facebook-everything device. But
unlike Home, which made Facebook inescapable, Paper is intended to
transcend Facebook’s previous limits.
“This is really focused on content discovery
and content browsing,” said Mike Matas, Paper’s product designer. Mr.
Matas, a former Apple designer, joined Facebook in 2011 when his
start-up, Push Pop Press, was acquired by the social network, and he has
been working on the concepts behind the app ever since.
Paper joins a crowded field of
content-browsing apps, which include the established leader, Flipboard,
as well as newer entrants like Inside.com, Trove, Yahoo’s News Digest and Prismatic.
Mr. Matas suggests that Paper is different
from all of those. “There’s nothing out there for displaying really rich
stories,” he said. (I’m sure Flipboard, which resembles a well-designed
digital magazine, would beg to disagree.)
But Paper’s combination of social signals
from friends and selections by human editors, an approach similar to
that used by Trove, could make it an appealing alternative for Facebook
users who primarily use the service to discover interesting articles and
videos rather than communicate directly with friends.
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