Facebook Reportedly Set To Launch Flipboard-Like Social News Reader Called Paper
January 15, 2014
Facebook is set to launch its very own mobile news reading service, according to a new report by Re/code.
The service is called Paper, and it's said to bear more than a passing resemblance to the popular magazine-format social network aggregation app Flipboard:
Paper and Flipboard share a number of similarities, according to this person. Both essentially act as aggregators of rich media content, displaying a mix of news stories from publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post, along with status updates from Facebook users — all in a visually stunning “paper-like” format hearkening back to a time before digital devices.According to a source familiar with the service's development, Paper may be launched before the end of this month, either as a standalone mobile app or as a Web app optimized for mobile devices. As reported by The Wall Street Journal back in June last year, the upcoming news reader is closely overseen by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who intends to turn the social network into "the best personalized newspaper in the world." To that end, apparently, Facebook is looking to match the success of Flipboard in the social news reading app space. Well, with luck, it won't end up with another dud like Facebook Poke, which it launched in December 2012 in response to the growing popularity of the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat.