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Facebook Paper turns the social network into a personalized newsroom

Facebook Paper turns the social network into a personalized newsroom
Lewis Leong

Lewis Leong

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Facebook’s anticipated personalized news app, Paper, is out now for iOS. In a bold attempt to keep users glued to Facebook, the company has rethought how Facebook should work. Paper isn’t just a news reader, but a complete rethinking of what a mobile Facebook experience should be.

Gestures everywhere

When you first launch Paper, you’re greeted to a quick teaser video of what to expect. Then there’s a complete walk through of the app’s gesture control system, which isn’t inherently intuitive. Still, nailing down all the swipes and pulling shouldn’t take more than a few minutes and you’ll begin navigating the app without a problem. Launching Paper for the first time will also give you options to choose what type of news you want update for. There’s a good number of different categories from news headlines to “LOL” for funny posts.

Facebook Paper categories

Paper draws a lot of comparison to Flipboard app and for good reason. The curation and news categorization and their respective interfaces are extremely similar. Pages are animated like folding sheets of paper and buttons for commenting, liking, and sharing are almost identical between the two apps.

However, Paper takes a more minimalist approach in designing the interface as there aren’t any virtual buttons for navigation. While Flipboard still has buttons for back, search, and settings, Facebook has cleverly replaced all navigation buttons with gestures.

Your new curated News Feed

Paper strikes a nice balance between traditional Facebook features and news reader features. For example, cards for different stories are nothing more than Facebook posts, with the “Continue reading” text to expand text as well as links out to the websites where the stories can be found.

FB Paper

Herein lies the biggest difference between Flipboard and Paper: Flipboard provides a much better reading experience than Paper. Flipboard has worked with content creators to have specific Flipboard layouts for news stories while Paper simply links out to the mobile web. If a website has a terrible mobile layout, reading on Paper is painful. Flipboard is better optimized for reading, stripping away the traditional web interface and replacing it with a newspaper-like column view with beautiful images.

NYT FlipboardFlipboard is still a better reading experience

In terms of curation, both apps do a very good job of rounding up the most interesting stories for each category. However, Flipboard has a dedicated “Flipboard Picks” section where Flipboard editors choose what they think is the most important news for the day. Paper doesn’t have this human-powered section, instead offering you up news from the people you follow and from the different news categorizes you subscribe to.

Goodbye, Facebook app

If you use Facebook as a source for news, you’re going to love Paper. If you still use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, Paper’s news focus may not be optimal for you, but you should still give it a try. While the Facebook app for iOS is still plenty useful, it looks quite dated next to the impressive much more visual and gesture controlled Paper app.

Paper is a fresh take on social sharing but will it be enough to keep users glued to Facebook? Messaging apps like SnapChat and WhatsApp are still gaining ground against Facebook’s Messenger product and Paper doesn’t do much to help the company in this regard. But if Facebook can completely rethink the Facebook app experience, imagine what it could do with Messenger in the future.

Facebook Paper is out now for iOS, though there’s no iPad version as of yet. There’s no word when Android users can expect to see this app.

Download Facebook Paper for iOS

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Lewis Leong

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