Facebook Launches Notify News App

Notify – Released By Facebook – News/Entertainment Stories

An app for iPhone usersknown as Notify has been released by Facebook that tends to collect news and entertainment stories in one regularly updated feed. Among the 70 organisation that would be providing stories to the app are CNN, Fox News and the Washington Post.

Those who intend to install the app can choose their own mix of sources which will post notification their feed. This competes openly with Twitter’s Moments and Apple’s News services that produce feeds of breaking stories. Facebook has mentioned in a blogpost that the feed of stories can be adapted on choosing from the various categories which comprise of movies, sport, music, news and celebrities.

Besides these, there are also categories for daily meditation exercises together with Getty picture library portraying iconic images from the same day in history. Presently the Notify service is only made available to iPhone users with Facebook account in the United States.

 It has not been mentioned by Facebook as to when or if the service is likely to be extended to the other areas of the world or other operating systems. Notification with regards to new articles had been seen on the lock screen of an iPhone and can be shard from that display.

Facebook – Jumping Off Point in the Digital Lives

Managing director of Analyst Company, Midia Research, Mark Mulligan, stated that the move made sense since Facebook had become the `jumping off point in the digital lives and the better a job it could do of this, the better it locks users in’.

He adds that it has seen standout success with spinning out Messenger and recognises that more touch points could develop with its users; the more it could create greater loyalty. Notify comes soon after Facebook had unveiled its Instant Articles service in May. This ought to hasten up delivery of off-site content by hosting it in its individual data centres.

Articles which have been featured on the service are from BuzzFeed, National Geographicand the New York Times besides six other media organisations. Initially, Instant Articles is available only on iPhones but a test of Android version has already started.

A rival company which is identical known as the Accelerated Mobile Pages – AMP initiative had been launched by Google and several other web firms in October. The AMP tends to store slimmed down copies of stories from dozens of news organisation to permit them to load quickly on portable devices.

Useful to Publishers/Readers

Facebook, in its official blog post had described its stations of notifications for 11 paragraphs prior to mentioning that `if you want to see more’ than the sentence or two on your lock screen, you could tap the notification to load it (around eight seconds) inside an in-app browser or one could just sit back and rely on this evolving medium to get updates.

It is likely that Notify seems like an experiment and Facebook would be utilising what it learns to inform the way it tends to build notifications in the Flagship Facebook app. Moreover, it would also be more useful to publishers and readers to enable users to subscribe to push notification from brands within Facebook of different levels of granularity.

This would help to separate those who desire to see everything from a publisher and from those who only prefer top stories and breaking news. Notify would perhaps help Facebook there. Meanwhile, should the user be in need of more push notifications on the phone, there are several publishers who would be ready to oblige.

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