Upon opening Paper for the first time, a voice guides you through the process of understanding how to get the most out of your daily news and social media intake.
My Facebook newsfeed is a bit of a mess. It’s cluttered with posts from high school classmates and other seemingly irrelevant news. The launch of Paper, Facebook’s foray into news, seems to resolve this problem.
“My Facebook newsfeed is basically a bunch of kids from my high school,” mathematics sophomore Julianna Aparicio said. “For the most part, I don’t really care about what they have to say. Trying to filter it and ‘unfollow’ people would just take too much work.”
Though this could be because of an increase in social networking, much can be attributed to Facebook’s design, which may clutter newsfeeds.
Many had been anticipating the drop of Paper as a solution to these “first-world problems.” The Paper app itself approaches the way we use Facebook in a different way, with a minimalistic design and customization to personal interests.
What I particularly liked about exploring photos on Paper is you can simply tilt your phone to move the photo and view it at a different focus. Swiping to get from one article to the next and unfolding of different categories shows off the product’s aesthetics.
Upon opening the app for the first time, a voice guides you through the process of getting the most out of your daily news and social media intake.
“It allows teenagers to get more involved with news because it will present it in a more appealing way,” business administration freshman Christian Parong said. “Maybe this will get younger people more involved with current events.”
Paper is a turning point in the way the way we use social media, and it’s different than the popular news application Flipboard. Paper combines Facebook with what Flipboard offers, with categories such as top headlines, technology, enterprise, sports, arts, ideas, planet and other personal interests that can be selected by the user. It maintains accessibility to not only your Facebook newsfeed, but also to features such as notifications, messaging and friend requests.
I found the headlines section to be extremely useful. Instead of having to go to my New York Times app, BBC app, CNN app and Washington Post app separately to read news, I now have them all lined up and organized on Paper, right alongside my social life.
The layout of this app is simple, which really brings it home.
Simplicity is the key. It is the reason that MySpace died and Facebook flourished. Stocks for Facebook jumped 16 percent the day they released the app.
Though this is a groundbreaking app, only time will tell whether it will do well. Paper has everything it needs to do well, but some might not agree.
“Personally, I don’t want to see my newsfeed with my news,” business administration freshman Nick Nish said. “Facebook is trying to solve the problem of this by giving top-rated posts, but no matter what, I still don’t really care about certain posts. It’s a problem with my newsfeed, not how many likes my friends are getting.”