“Paper makes storytelling more beautiful with an immersive design and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts,” Facebook said in a blog post announcing their new service that launched on Monday. “We’ve also made it easier to craft and share beautiful stories of your own.”
Well that’s good isn’t it – it’s what you’ve always wanted, right?
The new app, first to be born from the mothership Facebook Creative Labs will be available to all iPhone users from today onwards. But what is it? Well in basic terms it’s sort of like Flipboard in that it’s a news curation and reader app that pulls in stories, photos, videos and links from the user’s Facebook feed – alongside Facebook’s own notification bar and action buttons.
Facebook Paper will present users with a customisable and image led story feed that will give you snippets of news headlines, sports updates or even a recipe that you might be interested in. The tiled design can be tailored to suit your interests – much like boards on Pinterest and all of this will fit snuggly alongside your personal Facebook feed.
The content of the paper will range from well-known publications – perhaps you’re a Metro reader and enjoy a casual scan through the daily tripe or perhaps you’re looking for design inspiration from an up and coming design journal. You’ll be able to access content and scrolling articles and video content from the likes of The New York Times, Time magazine, USA Today, the Huffington Post to name but a few.
The release video from Facebook itself takes us on a journey through mediums of communication from letter writing (who doesn’t love a good bit of nostalgic pen and ink) to typewriting, only to transform this into a digital iPhone format. Their thinking behind the mechanics of the app was to evoke the same, ‘simple, natural movements’ that we use when thumbing through a daily newspaper or a book, but it’ll be very literally at our fingertips.
A feature I did take from the film as being something mighty cool was the fact that you can actually improve how you view panoramic photos by tilting your screen to explore them from corner to corner as well as being able to see every detail in much higher resolution. From a braggy holiday photo perspective, I’m interested to try that one out.
So that’s the consumer journey done – without having actually tried it out yet, I go by what I have researched and I think I like what I see so far. Of course there’s the age old question that always arises about this point which is – how are brand’s going to capitalise on this new development.
For now, it could be really interesting for everyone concerned as the app is currently an ad-free zone (I know, it’s like Facebook forgot they enjoyed taking people’s money). The ability to group Facebook stories together could help a brand to keep their following informed in one fell swoop or if they so wished and it helped their cause they could easily seed content out across a set period of time, almost like teasers so that fans could see the story unfold with limited effort.
All in all, I think that it was about time Facebook made a definitive change to the way they presented and delivered our newsfeed titbits and with Facebook Paper taking off without the pressure of ‘sponsored stories’ cramping its style just yet, it could be just the thing to help us fall back in love with our old friend again; and just in time for Valentine’s Day as well.