But if Facebook can reshape its image and begin being taken seriously as a news hub, then it has what no other reader does: A huge, 1-billion-plus strong user base, ready to "like" the whole internet.In his Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler describes the public internet of the late 2010's and early 2020's as a social battleground of hostile ideas and viral information, a transformation which has shifted discourse towards more private spaces: In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. Unlike Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook has grown up as a destination for personal networking of the "Here's my adorable dog," and "I just went to the beach" variety. That said, Facebook's biggest struggle with its own reader app will be getting its users to actually see Facebook as a vital source for getting their daily news dose. LinkedIn's smartphone and tablet apps also prominently display a News tab, where you can read, like and comment on stories. Professional social networking site LinkedIn has been redefining itself as a content platform, by launching its own blogging tool and purchasing Pulse for $90 million in April. It's also not the first social networking site to attempt to engage users through news-sharing. The company has already witnessed the success of visual reading apps like Flipboard and Pulse, and will most likely bank on a similar service. In the end, it just wasn't how people wanted to share or read the news - on Facebook or anywhere else.ĭon't, however, expect Facebook Reader to be anything revolutionary. In reality, they annoyed users with prompts to sign up and "blocks of auto-fed stories with second-class content," as Buzzfeed noted when discussing the collapse of social readers. In their ideal state, social readers were supposed to show you what your Facebook friends were reading, while also driving traffic to those stories. The network used to feature several "Social Readers" from the likes of The Washington Post and The Guardian. This isn't the first time Facebook has tried to bring news to the forefront of its service. Done right, a Facebook Reader has the potential to increase user engagement, and of course, give the company another outlet to serve up ads, where engagement means everything. The company has the data on which news stories its users are already sharing, and since Facebook is already a valuable funnel of traffic for news sites, the social network should have little problem ginning up interest among publishers who want to place their own channel into the app. ![]() Filling an app like this with stories interesting to you won't be an issue. Therefore, it's of little benefit to Facebook.īut if reports of Facebook's reader are true, the app will be more visual and closer to gesture-sensitive news-reading apps like Pulse and Flipboard, which encourage browsing and discovery. xml file, and would probably not benefit from that type of reader. ![]() Facebook's much more mainstream user base would likely shy away from something as unfamiliar as an RSS. RSS is for nerds, news junkies and journalists hooked to their computers all day, continuously keeping track of the latest stories from various sites. ![]() The standard RSS model used by Google Reader, Digg and Feedly doesn't make sense for Facebook. For those of us considering the alternatives, is Facebook really the place we want to turn? The RSS reader Feedly has seen its user base triple since Google announced its reader was going the way of the ghost. Google Reader has millions of dedicated users (count me in) scrambling to find alternatives before the July 1 kill date, and contenders have emerged from the likes of Digg, AOL and NetNewsWire. The app supposedly will cull stories from multiple sources, including links shared by your Facebook friends as well as content from partnered publishers, and display them in a Flipboard-like fashion, allowing users to swipe through articles and images. ![]() According to The Wall Street Journal, the social networking giant is building a mobile app - not-so-uniquely dubbed "Reader" - for browsing news stories on smartphones and tablets. Just as Google is set to put its RSS reader to rest next week, reports of Facebook working on its own news reader are surfacing.
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