Facebook on Thursday officially unveiled Paper, a new app created by Facebook Creative Labs, though it did so without any sort of big press event around the new application, which includes tons of content, including your news feed, news articles, photos and more. In other words, it’s much more robust than a simple RSS feed replacement to compete with FlipBoard, as earlier rumors suggested it might be.
The application, initially available for iPhone, reminds us a bit of Facebook home in that it’s very heavy on media, including pictures (which you can pan across using the accelerometer on your iPhone, called “Ken Turns” according to a highlight video). Stories can be picked from a sliding row of cards at the bottom of the screen. You can even use it to share your stories, almost eliminating any true need to access the iOS app for Facebook. Better yet, it doesn’t have any advertisements right now, The Verge said, so you can escape the litterbox of ads that has become the standard News Feed.
The hope is that, with Paper, users will find a new way to continue sharing to Facebook – keeping users engaged on a platform that is arguably becoming a bit stale in the face of competitors such as Tumblr, Vine and even Facebook’s own Instagram. We’ll bring you more coverage as soon as we get a copy to play with. In the meantime, watch the video above that goes over a bunch of the new features.
