Paper's main target Flipboard
Facebook is almost ready to launch its own news reader service to take on Flipboard at its own game.
Paper, as the service is called, will apparently launch in the coming weeks as either a mobile app or a mobile-focused web service.
That’s according to a fresh report on the matter from Re/code, which cites an unnamed source familiar with the matter.
According to the report, Paper will share many of its features with Flipboard, the current big-hitter in the mobile news reading space. Like Flipboard, Paper will essentially aggregate existing news sources from established publications and websites. It will also mix in Facebook status updates.
As the name suggests, Paper will rejig these stories into a format that tips its news-hound hat to the kind of physical news-disseminating publications (that’s newspapers) we relied on before the internet took hold.
The Paper project has been in the works for years now with the Facebook team that brought you the News Feed feature, and actually started life as an attempt to overhaul that simple stream of content. Indeed, March’s News Feed refresh is said to have represented a portion of the Paper team’s efforts up to then.
Back in June 2013, it was rumoured that Facebook was preparing an RSS reader service to receive former Google Reader users when the latter service was finally shuttered the following month.
It now seems that Facebook has its sights set on a much more ambitious and visually stimulating target. We could well find out for sure before January is finished.
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