Facebook’s Paper is Facebook without the Facebook

Publishers, “emerging voices,” brands get a platform separate from users.

Casey Johnston – Jan 30, 2014 8:10 am | 37

Facebook's Paper focuses on content curation and a full-screen experience.

Facebook announced Thursday a new app that will revamp the presentation of content on the site into a more streamlined format. The app, called Paper, presents content from both users and brands in a new interface and organizes it into sections for browsing.

The announcement of Paper has been rumored for some time, but its release as a new standalone app comes as a surprise. Facebook has a mixed track record in this area: its Messenger app was a grand success, but Home was a disaster and Poke was virtually ignored (Zuckerberg now calls this foray a “joke,” according to an interview in Bloomberg Businessweek).

Paper presents user updates as “stories:” captions overlaid on large-format photos, auto-playing videos, and even long or short text screeds all in an edge-to-edge, full-screen format. The default “section” in the app is the user’s Facebook news feed, but users can pull new sections up from a set of cards, such as “Headlines” or Tech,” and browse between them in one pane.

Perhaps not the most effective use of space for this.

“Each section includes a rich mix of content from emerging voices and well-known publications,” Facebook says. This gives the biggest clue to the real intended creators for Paper: brands, be they news outlets or celebrities.

While the conventional news feed does get a spot in Paper, the rest of the app will be given over to the component of Facebook that is doing the most creating for the platform and getting the most interaction from users. The app also elevates that higher-quality content up and away from the News Feed, which can be a little more of a mixed bag. If users ignore the News Feed card, Paper becomes, essentially, Facebook without Facebook.

On the backend, Facebook says the app will be hand-curated by a set of editors employed to keep Paper’s sections interesting. There is small potential for Facebook to gain a bit of traction as a Tumblr-like blogging platform with its visual focus in an interface that can also accommodate text, but it’s a less likely scenario.

Facebook’s Paper will be available only on iOS starting February 3.