Facebook Paper is a social news reader app that lets the users to browser through their News Feed stories, photos, videos and other curated stories.
It is one of the first standalone apps released by Facebook Creative Labs. The Facebook Creative Labs is a special section within Facebook that aims at bringing standalone mobile apps. Facebook Groups is yet another app that is rumored to come soon.
Coming to Facebook Paper, it has a Flipboard-like user interface. It welcomes the user with a Paper feed that has a big photo from a popular story at the top, followed by other stories below.
With Facebook Paper, you can read curated stories from various sections like photography, food, design and more. There are as much as 19 sections that you can browse through.
The main idea behind this app is to bring stories that are great, but not shared by your friends. It’s no longer Facebook anymore with this app, rather a Facebook newspaper, thanks to the Facebook Paper’s news curation algorithm and the human Facebook editors.
The stories from these sections are not personalized though. This means that all the persons would see the same stories all over the world.
The app has been designed to make sharing stories easily with your friends.
Alternative to Facebook native app
The very idea of the Facebook native app is to keep the users engaged with their News Feed stories. With Facebook Paper having this now, and that too with bigger images and a beautiful user interface, people may consider ditching the Facebook native app.
Right now, Facebook Paper doesn’t come with ads, which includes the sponsored stories too. But, it is believed that Facebook will bring ads once people start engaging a lot with this new app.
If you wish to have a look into Facebook Paper before it’s out, you may check this video on Vimeo or have a look at Facebook Paper webpage.
Facebook Paper is available only for United States iPhone users for now. It is scheduled for launch on February 3, 2014. Facebook Paper for Android and other mobile platforms should come soon.