Facebook’s always looking for the next thing, and the service it has its eye on now is mobile news reading and curation. The social network has the likes of Flipboard and Zite in its sights with a new app called Paper.
According to a report from Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s new site, Re/code, this is what Paper will be when it launches:
Paper and Flipboard share a number of similarities, according to this person. Both essentially act as aggregators of rich media content, displaying a mix of news stories from publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post, along with status updates from Facebook users — all in a visually stunning “paper-like” format hearkening back to a time before digital devices.
The report suggests that, right now, Paper will be launched before the end of the month, and could come as both a standalone app and a web app.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard Facebook was going after Flipboard. We reported last June that Mark Zuckerberg was personally heading up a project to launch a Flipboard-style news aggregation app.
It seems like a natural fit for Facebook, which is already a major news aggregation service for a majority of people. But this is also still Facebook, which means that unless I want to aggregate a bunch of Upworthy and Viral Nova stories, I’ll probably be better off continuing to use Flipboard or Zite.
Source: Re/code
