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. 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. 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.
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 RSS reader Feedly has seen its user base triple since Google announced its reader was going the way of the ghost. For those of us considering the alternatives, is Facebook really the place we want to turn?
Probably not. The standard RSS model used by Google Reader, Digg and Feedly doesn’t make sense for Facebook. RSS is for nerds, news junkies and journalists hooked to their computers all day, continuously keeping track of the latest stories from various sites. Facebook’s much more mainstream user base would likely shy away from something as unfamiliar as an RSS .xml file, and would probably not benefit from that type of reader. Therefore, it’s of little benefit to Facebook.
But 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. Filling an app like this with stories interesting to you won’t be an issue. 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. 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.
Read also:
Facebook, With a Focus on Mobile, Works on Project for News Via Users (Wall Street Journal)
Facebook Developing Flipboard-Like Newsreader: WSJ (Huffington Post)
“Facebook Reader” Is Real, But It's Not RSS Or A Google Reader Wannabe (TechCrunch)
Explore: 130 additional articles.