A Week with Paper: Will it flourish or fold?

Facebook released a fresh, simplified alternative to their notoriously bloated mobile experience. Deemed “Paper,” this puppy was just released last Monday, showing off an image-rich format that just begs to be browsed. While the world doesn’t really need another aggregation app, this is a darn good substitute for the original Facebook. Here are my thoughts accumulated from the first week of use.

First Impressions

First off, I had a hard time finding it in the app store. Probably due to paper toss apps de trop. Skip the endless search and just go to Facebook.com/Paper for a painless download.

Upon opening, there’s a teaser video not unlike a preamble to your favorite indie flick. This, coupled with a thorough introduction by a young, sultry Siri-type voice, really set expectations high right off the bat. While the interface is truly intuitive, the app starts you off with action checkpoints to assure you that your finger swiping instincts are on point.

Face it

Paper was designed by Facebook Creative Labs to focus on a single experience or piece of content at a time, rather than rapidly scrolling through what is essentially a crammed mobile version of their website. See something you like? Swipe up for a closer look. Ready to scoot back out? Swipe down to return to a more inclusive view. All in all, there’s no guessing game involved.

Contents

As for the what you’re actually reading, the app carries over the news feed, notifications, messages, and search features, from its parent. It goes a step further by providing a slew of popular headlines on the topics of your choice. It’s much like Flipboard in that you select the areas of interest to be included as sections in your Paper. However, it currently lacks in customization and timeliness, as it’s selected by a human editorial team at Facebook. For you news junkies, there’s nothing groundbreaking here, but for me, it combines the need for news and social in one interface, while keeping them partitioned just enough. One plus is that there are no ads for the time being, so you can escape the sponsored posts by making the swap.

Verdict

In the near future, I’d like to see customizable sections, local news, and the ability to remove stories or sources you don’t care about. Compared to Flipboard, it’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction, and very impressive for their first iteration. It didn’t take long to realize Paper could replace the original Facebook app, and I haven’t reverted all week. Once the novelty wears off, we’ll see how usage evolves, but for now, Paper has won me over. Give it a shot.