Facebook Marks 10th Anniversary With Mobile News App

Facebook came out on 3 February with Paper, a second-generation news aggregator for iPhones that will become the newest direct competitor to such already-popular apps as Pulse and Flipboard on tablets and smartphones.

Paper is available now for free download at the Apple App Store for iPhones or from the Facebook website and is expected to become available soon in the Google Play store for Android devices.

10th anniversary

The social network made the app available on the eve of its 10th anniversary. Chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg started the company in his Harvard dorm room on 4 February, 2004.

By supplying a legitimate real-time news stream that mixes posts from personal friends with news services on the front of smartphones, Paper is, in fact, a new version of Facebook.

With Facebook Paper, users will be able to do what they already do in the standard Facebook app for iPhone, except that there are no provisions for creating events, making lists or saving apps. The interface and news are organised by topic, not by any preference the user may have. Single stories take up the full space on the screen; there’s nothing unrelated in view.

With Facebook Paper, the company has reorganised its entire information flow by subject area instead of by chronology. In all, there are 19 subject sections from which users can choose. They include Score for baseball and other sports information, Exposure for photography-related news, and others.

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Originally published on eWeek.