According to reports, Facebook is going to introduce its standalone news collator app ‘Notify’ next week. The news app goes head-on with Apple’s News app, Snapchat’s Discover service and Twitter’s Moments service to provide a single source of news from multiple sources.
Facebook Notify aims to eliminate the inconvenience in downloading various news applications by aggregating everything in one app.
Facebook has partnered with a great deal of news sources like Mashable, CBS, Washington Post, CNN etc. as reported by the Financial Times. The app will collect news articles and content from all the media partners and push to the customer’s news feed. This means that the users will not have to download every Media specific application, instead the user will be able to subscribe to the above mentioned sources all in one place.
Facebook already has a sidebar in its main application for trending news and articles, however a standalone app was the need of the hour with rivals already in the market with their services.
Facebook had experimented with a similar service ‘Instant Articles’ this year, where the user could access articles from select publishers like Buzzfeed, Washington Post etc. all from embedded stories into Facebook’s news feed. This resulted in quicker loading times since the news opened directly on the media’s website. Media publishers could also benefit from this move by charging from advertisements and dividing profit with Facebook. Notify is basically the final implementation result of all the testing done till last month.
Facebook has created some great standalone apps like the Facebook Messenger, however it has failed in others like Facebook Slingshot, Poke and Facebook Paper to name a few. 2014 was the year where every Social Media start-ups ventured into standalone apps. While some did well, majority failed due of lack of direction and well thought out plans.
Embedding an app into the main application is not a task anymore, however a standalone app could attract users who would have otherwise stayed away from Facebook’s main application.
Source (paywall)
