Gadgetory

look this is alice hamburger with the verge my facebook newsfeed is a bit of a mess especially on my iPhone we're digging through updates from friends news sites and ads just isn't that much fun anymore Facebook thinks it is the answer with paper an iPhone app that's part newsfeed part newspaper and it's totally ad free welcome to paper paper started as an experiment to make Facebook look better on your phone there's no Chrome and the place of buttons you navigate with swipes and other gestures perhaps most noticeably Facebook's iconic newsfeed has been flipped over each story takes up the whole screen and you browse them horizontally like in facebook home this means you can't swipe through your feet as quickly as you can on say Instagram but that's kind of the point a lot of the designers on our team have a traditional graphic design background and so we started looking at it like you do like a printed book with a baseline grid going horizontally across all the stories and as you flip all the text stays aligned the photos stay aligned or if you're going vertically like this everything has to pull out a frame and it's a little bit more disorienting so as you're going horizontally it's just a lot simpler transition the updated newsfeed is terrific pairing a slick interface with super responsive gestures it's easy to keep track of stories as you swipe through them since profile pictures text and photos are always in the same place no more swipe tap swipe tap swipe tap like in vertical news feeds as much as I like the new newsfeed however it still won't make your friends Spring Break pictures anymore interesting so the company didn't stop there by swiping over you can reach the apps news section a completely new effort from Facebook that blends Twitter Flipboard and RSS the section collects posts from top news sites like CNN the New York Times but also posts the Facebook's editorial team wants to draw more attention to tapping on a story unfolds at Flipboard style into a full-screen article view people are sharing more and more things on Facebook and they're coming to Facebook for more and more things so they're not just coming to see what their friends are doing they also get the news or they follow that restaurant that they're interested in or an athlete that they like and so as you get more and more of these things it's it you want some breathing room to get space and be able to know that if I want to know what happened in the Australian Open last night I can go to the score section it's gonna be their papers new section isn't as good as Flipboard or dedicated news apps like circa but it should provide plenty of stimulation for people who already rely on their Facebook feed for news paper is gorgeous but feels like an odd fit for Facebook's current ecosystem of apps paper includes notifications friend requests and messenger there's also a new Timeline view that presents a far prettier flipbook version of your life versus Facebook's main app setting aside events and groups paper does just about everything Facebook's main app does it feels like the app Facebook wanted to build but was afraid to push too it's hundreds of millions of mobile users the main Facebook app is one of the most if not the most popular app and lots of people really like it and so we don't want to tell people what they should use we don't want to come and rearrange people's furniture we just want to put out this app that our team thinks is really great and hopefully anyone who agrees can use it how they'd like back in the old days of web portals an era which Earth's Facebook having everything in one place was valuable but not anymore especially on mobile where people want tightly packed intuitive apps that do one or two things well paper still does a whole lot of things but it's explicitly built for a mobile world and it's also great for news readings something many people have come to rely on Facebook for especially on mobile the screen is like the size of a business card and like fitting like a whole world inside of a business card is like a challenging task it requires like design innovation as well as engineering innovation to make it so when you're looking at something that small you feel like you're looking at something really big and expansive paper might be too intimidating for many of Facebook's billing users but there are some great ideas here this is the mobile Facebook I've always wanted you