Use Facebook Paper app or stick with Flipboard ? Paper is the first product born of Creative Labs, a new space within Facebook for small teams to develop ideas and apps and see if they stick. To build the app, Zuckerberg enlisted Mike Matas, who designed software for the original iPhone, Nests trademark thermostat interface, and Al Gores pioneering interactive eBook Our Choice. His work has cemented touch-based interfaces in the modern vernacular — especially as they pertain to manipulating text and photos on a screen with your fingers. When Facebook acquired Matas’ digital publishing company Push Pop Press in 2011, it asked him to apply his skills to Facebook content. Paper was initially conceived to make Facebook look better, more like the interactive, always-relevant personal newspaper Zuckerberg hoped Facebook would be. Paper turned out a little bit differently: the app abandons Facebook’s singular News Feed in favor of several — each containing a different kind of news. One is your regular old Facebook feed, and you choose the others among 20 categories like Headlines, Planet, Cute, Tech, Pop Life, and Score. Each section includes a stream of stories laid out horizontally inside cards — you swipe left and right to scroll, not up and down as Facebook has trained us all to do. Paper’s Facebook feed is just a better-looking, more responsive version of what you’ll find inside the company’s main app. Every other section is a mix of recent and popular posts from the profile pages of Facebooks favorite publishers, curated by a small (and powerful) editorial team within the company. In Headlines, for example, youll find posts from Time, the AP, The New York Times, Politico, and NPR. In Cute, youll find a range of more curated posts from the likes of Grumpy Cat, Laughing Squid, and Zooey Deschanels site HelloGiggles. Most story cards you’ll find therein have been created by Facebook with custom fonts, colors, and designs to better match 40-some publications the company hand-picked for launch day. National Geographic cards, for example, feature bright yellow borders to match the magazines design. Paper lets publishers’ content live and breathe, in its ordinary attire, on another website. Each card has a consistent look: a profile photo up top, followed by text, and then a card representing any linked article. Facebook’s goal, as Matas tells it, is to put content first, a philosophy that has consumed Valley tech culture — like Medium, Paper makes liberal use of white space to draw your eye towards photos or text, and like Flipboard, images are often full-bleed, taking over your entire screen. If you swipe up on a card, a web view of the linked article folds open, Flipboard-style. When youre finished reading, you can pull down on an article to close it like an envelope. You can like stories, comment on them, share them, and even save them to read later using Pocket, Instapaper, Safaris Reading List, and Pinboard — more proof that Facebook takes Paper seriously as a news-reading app. With the addition of news sections and the absence of ads, Paper becomes even more appealing. (Facebook, of course, wont deny that Paper may someday have ads, but for now Im thankful.) Apps like Circa and Flipboard are better than Paper at curating top news, since that’s their expertise, but I came away impressed by Paper’s editorial selections, and the hand crafted story cards designed for each publication.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 03:36:18 +0000
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