Facebook has taken the wraps off Paper, a new social news aggregator app that is designed to help you bring all the important stories, and even let you create your own. The app is first of the many apps that are in the works at Facebook Creative Labs, which plans to unveil a suite of mobile apps soon. Paper, which has very similar ideologies as Flipboard, shows you all the long form stories from your news feed, and lets you like and comment on them from the app, much like Facebook home, with a really cool presentation of full screen images and a card-like interface for other content. Other than that, you can also add your own categories and populate them with your own desired sources, just like you would, on a traditional news aggregator. Here is a promo video of the app in action
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhrbT9O6kW8
Storytelling and sharing have been reimagined in Paper to show stories at their best.
- Everything responds to your touch so you can pick up or thumb through stories with simple, natural movements
- You can tilt your phone to explore high-resolution panoramic photos from corner to corner, and see faces and other important details up close
- Fullscreen autoplay videos come to life and bring you deep into the action
- Beautifully detailed covers make it easy to spot articles from trusted publishers and decide what to read or watch.· Articles unfold in the app and appear fullscreen for a focused reading experience
- When you’re ready to tell your own story, you know exactly what your post or photo will look like because you see a live preview before you share it
As you saw from the video above, the app is tastefully designed, with iOS 7 clearly in focus. The app is set to be released for the Apple iPhone on February 3rd and will eventually move to other platforms and form factors like Android and iPad. The aim of this app seems to be using Facebook’s underlying social connections as a platform, and making the news more discoverable and shareable. Naturally, we think the app will not feature sharing to other platforms, but we’ll definitely give it a good look to find out if that’s true and let you know how it goes. Until then, remember that this might be just the tip of an icerberg, as Facebook plans to unleash more apps in the coming months, completely focused on mobile. After a healthy quarter, will this new direction pay them off? Only time can tell.
On a sidenote, we wonder what’ll happen when this comes to the iPad, which already has a Paper(by 53) app.