Our beloved Google Reader is going away in July, we all know it and I’m sure many of us feel the pain. In the wake, everyone has been striving to find another suitable alternative. From the ashes, several companies have since announced support for a reader like service, namely Digg. Apparently, Facebook is now preparing a Flipboard style mobile app or reader service.
It makes sense when you think about it, the way Facebook is currently setup and all the recent updates to the service would suggest that Facebook could make a great reader of sorts. Obviously, the real issue is going to be advertisements and how they are spoon fed to users.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the product has been in development for more than a year. Furthermore, Michael Matas (a former employee of Apple who is now a Facebook designer) is supposedly in charge of this project.
Earlier this year during an unveil of the new Facebook news-feed redesign, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he wanted the platform to be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” Around that time the company also introduced hashtags for the popular social network, similar to what you find on Twitter. It makes sense that the company would now be focused on providing some kind of news-source app for users.
At this time it is unclear whether or not the new app will be integrated with Facebook, or if it will be a part of a different service entirely. Judging by Zuckerberg’s comments I would assume it’s going to work directly with Facebook. Especially since currently Facebook earns about one-third of their total revenue from mobile.
Sources say the app will be offered for iOS exclusively at launch. It will supposedly offer trending content to users so that they spend more time reading on Facebook, thus generating more revenue for the company. Perhaps the iOS exclusivity is to get back at the Android community for hating on Facebook Home so much (that was totally a jest)?
What do you think of this news? Are you prepared to use a Facebook based news reader if it becomes available for Android?