Facebook announced a new app called Paper for iOS today, an application that presents the kinds of stories and updates you normally see in Facebook's News Feed, but in a manner that seems tailor-made for a hand-sized screen. It's Facebook completely reimagined for mobile, with a greater emphasis on storytelling and images than on a friend's timeline. It's a gesture-driven application that finally doesn't seem rooted in keyboard-and-mouse navigation.
It looks beautiful, and we can't wait to stare at it when it becomes available on February 3rd.
Facebook repeatedly talks about this app in terms of stories, and that focus seems present not only in how individual events are presented, but also in how you discover new content. While you previously had to navigate to a page for its content-either through a friend's timeline or directly-Paper finally allows you to end up there based on the interests you share with that brand or artist or organization. If you're big on, for example, tech stories, you can probably find WIRED by swiping into that category in Paper.
You scroll through stories horizontally with your thumb, and tap them to drill down and dive deep. You tilt through panoramas and twist photos to see them better. Paper is designed to immerse you into the experience, without all the buttons and application chrome of the main Facebook app.
Paper is exactly the kind of stand-alone Facebook really needs right now. It gives you a completely new way to experience Facebook, without taking the old familiar News Feed away. And even more importantly, it might be the most beautiful thing Facebook has ever announced. That matters because on mobile, everything is a status update. Everything is competing for your attention. Facebook is under siege from messaging apps that threaten to circumvent Facebook's hoary old news feed entirely by letting us communicate directly. Snapchat and Twitter and WhatsApp and Kik and a hundred other icons on your home screen all compete to grab your attention and keep it.
Facebook can fight the rush of real-time with the stagecraft of beauty and elegance. Instead of looking at Facebook as just a place for quick-hit updates and simple snapshots, this encourages you to think of it as a place for stories about your life. A place that's as beautiful as the world you live in.
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.
Read more by Mat Honan
Follow @mat on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment