What most people don’t know is that Facebook is not just a social media company. It has started to research and develop mini products in various other fields as well. Facebook Creative Labs, Facebook Inc department that is doing these researches and innovations, has just launched its first product, PAPER.
Paper is a mobile based news media application that allows you to stay updated with the latest news around the world. You can explore the news content and also recommend the news post to your friends via a ‘Reshare’ feature that reminds you of Retweet feature of twitter.
The application has an appealing design and displays computer as well as human curated news posts. You can subscribe to your favorite news websites or follow your friends. You can also direct the app to display post of only your area of interest.
More about Paper
Paper app essentially realizes the dream of Mark Zuckerberg of making the newspaper obsolete. Well it still has some ways to go but the app is still a much better version than Google NewsStand, much better in fact than News Stand. From design perspective itself, Paper is better than Newstand.
One of the many features of the application is the ability to add sections in the app. You can divide your newsfeed in sections such as sports, business, environment, world news, photography etc. But the main magic of this app is that it not only displays posts by popular news websites but also by famous bloggers, experts, and if the content is good, comments by average readers. You can literally create your own post, check how it would be displayed on others devices, and share it with the world using the app itself.
Now Facebook is known for inventing the Like button, which was copied into various forms. But here it has borough the Reshare feature, much similar to retweet. You can reshare any news post you like to your friends and followers.
The application is going to be launched US wide on February 3, 2014. Its available for iOS users only for now.
A long term strategy
The main product of Facebook Inc, the social media website Facebook, is stuffed of features. Many of them are not even used by daily users themselves. Scope of growth and thus scope of growth in revenue is small in the main product. Therefore Mark Zuckerberg is focusing on launching a series of applications to present an overall complete experience to Facebook users. Technically Facebook is walking in the footsteps of Google but since the platforms has changed since 2001, the year Google started getting serious, Facebook will have to face entirely new sets of challenges than Google.
Rachit Agarwal
