Facebook launches Notify: a notifications app for news you care about
Facebook, the social network, has brought another new application to the App Store. This time, Zuckerberg et al. are looking to solve the problem of news notifications on iOS.
Called Notify and available now free of charge (and optimized, we might add, for the iPhone/iPod touch only), the application brings notifications for news, sports, weather, and much more to your iPhone handset. As you might expect, Notify allows users to customize the kinds of notifications they receive, and the app does this through deploying “stations” for iPhone owners to pick and choose from.
In a recently published blog post, Facebook explained:
Everyone has different interests, so whether you’re into sports, celebrities, news, movies, music or shopping, Notify makes it easy to find notifications you’re into with a broad selection of great “stations” across a variety of categories.
Here are a handful of examples:
- The Final Scores station from FOX Sports provides end-of-game summaries for your favorite teams.
- The Daily AM Forecast station from The Weather Channel sends a local weather forecast at the start of your day.
- Hot New Trailers from Fandango gets you the newest trailers for the hottest movies as they drop.
So, users can opt-in to stations, and from here, relevant updates from individual stations will be published. The app, being a Facebook creation, can also somewhat disturbingly suggest recommendations for stations “based on your Facebook profile.”
Notify for iPhone.
From here, notifications bring users up to date news, including videos, and these can be viewed, saved, or even shared using your smartphone. For now, the application is available in the United States only, and as of yet we’re unsure if Facebook is planning a wider launch for the application.
As always, we’ll keep you posted on this front. In the meantime, you can download Notify now; as mentioned, it’s optimized for the iPhone/iPod touch, and the application can be downloaded free of charge.
