For Facebook’s tenth birthday, the social platform gave itself a new app: Paper. The app — not to be confused with a disgruntled app of the same name — promises a revolution in the way that users interact with content. While the current Facebook newsfeed features a melange of status updates, baby pictures, shared news links and the rest, Paper sorts all of this data into separate streams. The app, which launched on Monday, allows users to toggle between categories of content including “Headlines,” “Cute,” “Score” and “Ideas.” With this new product, Facebook offers its flurry of content in a more curated format, much like the “personalized newspaper” that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he would like Facebook to become. On this episode of Mediatwits, we’ll be joined by Michael Reckhow from Facebook to discuss their new app. We’ll also have Andrew Lih of American University, Felix Salmon of Reuters and PR guru Sarah Evans, with PBS MediaShift’s Mark Glaser hosting.
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MEDIATWITS BIOS
SPECIAL GUESTS
BACKGROUND
Facebook’s new Paper app is big on design: it even made the back button obsolete with a simple upward swipe that takes users to the previous page. Pictures take up the full top-half of the screen. Plus, the separate newsfeeds give Facebook users the chance to completely bypass the posts and photos of friends to toggle directly over to a highly curated news or humor section. As many commentators have pointed out, this move away from the social aspect of Facebook indicates that Facebook is expanding its field of vision to its potential as a news curator as well. But Facebook isn’t treading into open water: aggregation apps such as Flipboard and Digg already offer curated news pulled from all over the web. What does Facebook offer that is distinct from these other newsreaders? And how will this new app change the way that users interact with Facebook?
OTHER NEWS:
Felix Salmon on Upworthy’s Viral Math, Reuters
#FreeAJStaff Campaign Gains Steam, Huffington Post
Google Reaches Settlement in EU Antitrust Case, WSJ.D
Alleged Silk Road Mastermind Indicted, Mashable
Claire Groden is the podcast intern for PBS Mediashift and a senior at Dartmouth College. You can follow Claire on Twitter @ClaireGroden.