Is Facebook Paper short for Facebook NewsPaper?
Thursday’s unveiling of a new standalone content curation app, Facebook Paper, comes after weeks of speculation and rumors about Facebook hiring editors (the humans in the mix) to help curate content for the hyper-visual mobile app. Now it’s real, though not here yet. Facebook Paper arrives in the AppStore on Feb. 3. That leaves us a few days to speculate on what Facebook is really up to and if, in fact, this is the social media giant ever-so-gingerly dipping its toe into the content creation / media company waters.
See also: Facebook Announces News Reader App 'Paper'
First, though, a little primer on the app. Think of it as Facebook Magazine, a standalone app that starts with your News Feed, but looks nothing like the familiar blue Facebook mobile app or web page. It’s full-frame images that seem to extend beyond the borders of your phone, videos that are ready to play with a tap, overlaid captions, posts from not only friends, but curated posts from Facebook editors who are experts in their fields and Facebook’s new topic areas.
Those topics read less like a social network and more like a content website: Sports, Science, Tech, Food Design and more. Facebook told me the app will start off with your own News Feed just like the traditional Facebook app (you do have to sign in to use it), but you can start dragging and dropping in topics to create a customized reading experience.
Watching the video and reading Facebook’s announcement, it’s hard to not come away with the idea that this Facebook magazine will soon feature “Facebook Original” content from those newly hired experts.
Except it won’t.
Representatives for Facebook told Mashable, “Facebook isn't a content creator, so it's not accurate to call us a media company.” As always, Facebook points to its members, the people who use Facebook to post their own photos and stories as its real content creators. Obviously, those service members include companies and major media brands like USA Today, The New York times, Sports Illustrated and, of course, Mashable. So the mix will include professional content, but Facebook insists it won’t come from them –- not now and not for the foreseeable future.

“Our overall strategy at this time is that we want to connect people with the content that's most interesting to them. There's no vision to include Facebook original content,” wrote a Facebook spokesperson in an email to Mashable.

This makes some sense when you consider that, despite having well over a billion users worldwide, Facebook has resisted the impulse to create original content on either its desktop or mobile platform.

Enter the Gatekeepers

On the other hand Facebook Paper is, in at least one key way, a fundamentally different product than Facebook Mobile: It has human intervention. Your Facebook News Feed, aside from paid-for ad placement, promoted posts and you making your own choices about who you friend, like and add to your feed, is a product of algorithms that look at likes, popularity.

Facebook Paper is more of a marriage of algorithms and biology. The algorithms still, according to Facebook, look at Likes, reshares, and engagement, the signals, per say, to build your feed. The biological component, the curator, has a different and ostensibly more important role. She handles:

Objective determination of beautiful and interesting things: A computer probably can’t tell you if a photo is beautiful or why a baby balancing a bear on his head is worth seeing, but a person can.

What you see first, and second and third: This means that the curators are, perhaps, even more important than the algorithms. They have the ordering job in Facebook Paper. Doing this work will help Facebook Paper contain themes and context in a more magazine style. “For example, [you’ll see] a story in the Scores section about the Super Bowl followed by a post by one of the athletes who played in the game,” said a Facebook representative.

Show you what you’re missing: Facebook Paper will use any and all publicly available content to build interesting pages. You’re not friending every content creator or brand on Facebook, but if the curator thinks there’s interesting content that everyone in their channel should be interested in, they’ll add it to Facebook Paper.

As for who these very important curators are, Facebook isn’t saying, though our contact told us that the Family matters section is “edited by a published author in the space.”

The Partners

Facebook did work with some unnamed publications in advance of this launch, so expect to see more of their articles in your Facebook Paper feed. “Organizations don't have to have worked with us before hand for their content to appear in sections.” explained the Facebook rep.

Whither FlipBoard?

The look and function leads to inevitable comparisons with newsreader leader Flipboard. Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue hasn’t said much about Facebook Paper beyond this Tweet:

@WallandBroad nope. just the beginning actually.

— Mike McCue (@mmccue) January 30, 2014

And Facebook is looking to dispel any notion that Facebook Paper is like the social-media-driven, super scannable, content-rich, magazine-style content aggregator.

Perhaps the biggest difference it that users can post directly from Facebook Paper to Facebook. Flipboard is more squarely focused on consumption. Facebook’s view: “Paper is as much about creating content as it is about reading content.”

The social media company also contends that the long-standing description of Facebook Paper as a “news reader” is inaccurate. Facebook describes the app as “a network that connects people who share interesting content with people interested in those stories.” The company adds that Paper is also about discovery of new people and organizations.

Does all that truly set it apart from Flipboard and other products like it? Maybe, but Flipboard could add some of those features and soon the apps would be far more alike.

Ultimately Facebook Paper is really just another way of looking at Facebook. It’s like they took the service, stripped away the entire interface and built it only from the parts that would work on a small screen: images, videos, gesture-based interface, all perfect for your 4-inch screen. It is still just Facebook, though. The Likes, comments and even posts you create within Paper all go back to Facebook.

The long-term vision may not, in fact, be to create original Facebook content, but it certainly is to build a fully original mobile experience, one that could, if Facebook is really lucky become the primary avenue through which everyone experiences Facebook.

Or, Facebook Paper could suffer the same fate as Poke. An app launched with some fanfare in 2012 to compete with Snapchat. No one uses it now and Mark Zuckerberg told BloombergBusinessWeek Poke was "more of a joke." It's a clever way of distancing himself from a mistake. If Paper goes south, will Zuckerberg say Paper was designed to be disposable?

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
@WallandBroad nope. just the beginning actually.