Pros & Cons
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- Simple, elegant design.
- Intuitive navigation.
- Pages and image load quickly.
- Free.
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- Lacks Events.
- Create Post hidden behind cover images.
- Insular sharing.
Facebook's finally created an iPhone app that makes me giddy. Paper, Facebook's entry into the ever-expanding social news reader space, not only feeds you articles of interest based on who you follow on the mega-popular social network, but also trending stories from sources such as Complex Magazine, Huffington Post, Pitchfork, and Vice. Paper is a beautiful, elegant app that nonetheless lacks a key feature or two, preventing me from abandoning the existing Facebook iOS app or our Editors' Choice award-winning Flipboard for iPhone.
Facebook News
Paper is a Facebook product, so Zuckerberg and crew require potential users to already have a Facebook account (you can't create one using the app). It simplifies the sign-up process (your Facebook credentials will log you into Paper) and leverages posts from the people and brands that you follow to create panels of content. That's the initial step.
The first panel you see after logging into the app is dedicated to your FB news feed, but next to it is an empty panel where you can drag top-level content panels (Headlines, Tech, All City, for example) from the bottom of the screen to the top. The category panels don't reveal which sources are inside until you add them to your news feed—I prefer Flipboard's more open approach. Tapping "Done" confirms your selections.
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