Facebook launches social magazine app
Facebook has moved quickly to live up to its promise of launching more standalone apps in 2014 by unveiling Paper, a Flipboard-like social magazine app for iPhone devices.
Video: Introducing Facebook Paper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhrbT9O6kW8
The app curates “stories” from a user’s Facebook News Feed as well as personalised content from across the web in genres such as photography, tech, science, food and sports.
The content is curated by a mixture of Facebook’s editors and the app’s algorithm – surfacing articles from both well-known sources and up and coming bloggers. Users can also compose their own “stories” to appear on the app.
Facebook says the app “reimagines storytelling and sharing” through its unique user experience, which allows users to zoom into photos by tilting their phone and autoplays fullscreen videos as they scroll through.
The app launches without advertising but it is clear that formats could be easily integrated as they have been on rival social magazine curation app Flipboard.
Paper, which launches on 3 February, is the first product created by Facebook’s Creative Labs team which was set up to build standalone, start-up-like mobile products.
The launch comes just a day after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set out the company’s vision to “build a handful of great experiences that are separate from what [people] think of as Facebook today that help to explore [the mobile] space and give people new ways to share”.
Mobile now accounts for more than half of Facebook’s total income. Mobile ad revenue surged to $1.25bn in the three months to December.