Facebook is said to be planning to launch its standalone news app with a list of media partners on board sometime next week. That’s according to Financial Times, which reports the app will be called Notify and include content from a list of media partners including CBS, The Washington Post, and Vogue. Reports of Facebook working on a separate mobile app focused on news rather than the social network first surfaced in early August.
The news comes just as Facebook announced today in its earnings report that it’s currently serving an average 1.01 billion daily active users each month…Notify is said to work differently from competing apps by alerting users of news stories as they develop rather than relying on users to visit a section within the app to discover content. CNN, Comedy Central, and Billboard are also said to be content partners, FT says.
Facebook’s Notify app follows Apple’s own pre-installed News app on iOS 9, which Apple says has over 40 million users since launching in mid-September. Offering its own take on presenting the news, Twitter recently launched a new feature called Moments that presents curated stories within the social network’s mobile app as well as on the web.
Facebook has already made the experience of consuming news and media easier through its main app as well with Instant Articles. Through several partnerships with various publishers, Facebook is able to pre-load content in rich media layouts so when readers follow through to a story there’s virtually zero loading time.
Aside from Facebook’s Instant Articles within its primary app, Facebook also supports a standalone version of its social network app called Paper which features a news-centric browser within.
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I’m excited! Hopefully, this app takes off more than Paper did! If you want to learn more about new apps check out my newly launched page about apps that you might not know about! (appy-hour.com)
The one reason Paper never actually took off is that it’s still available only on the US App Store. You can set up a US App Store account but that’s not something most people would want to do.
Corporate Media: “Oh no! Blogs! Twitters! Emails! How are we going to sell the American people on future necessary wars and other corporation-friendly laws when information spreads too quickly for us to counteract it?”
Facebook: “Well, have WE got the app for you…” :-D