Facebook News Reader May Debut In January

A Facebook news reader app may become a reality later on this month, according to a report by Re/code. The report stated that, according to a source familiar with the matter, “Facebook looks like it is finally going to launch in the coming weeks a news reading service built for mobile devices.”

The new product will be known as “Paper,” according to the unnamed source. The Paper app will be similar to the app Flipboard, a news aggregator that pulls in social updates alongside news stories from publications of interest to the user, according to Mashable.

This new product is rumored to have been the product of “years” of work, and may also be the result of earlier failed attempts at updating Facebook user’s News Feeds. According to Mashable, “the company has used other areas of the platform to demonstrate an interest in news aggregation over the past 12 months.”

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly played a part in the creation of Facebook’s Paper app, though most of the work has largely been the work of Facebook’s News Feed team and is even said to be the “pet project” for Facebook’s VP of Product, Chris Cox. Paper and Flipboard reportedly share a number of similarities. Re/code reported the following:

“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.”

It is not yet known whether Paper will exist as a standalone app or in some other format but, according to reports, it could be released as early as the end of January.

Will this be an app you’d be interested in? Or is Facebook going out of its way to make more unnecessary additions to a social media platform many are already annoyed with?

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