Why Facebook Would Want Its Own News Reader

A Facebook Reader could increase engagement and give the network a sweet ad channel.

 

 

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.

 

This isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to bring news to the forefront of its service. The network used to feature several “Social Readers” from the likes of The Washington Post and The Guardian. In their ideal state, social readers were supposed to show you what your Facebook friends were reading, while also driving traffic to those stories. 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 the end, it just wasn’t how people wanted to share or read the news — on Facebook or anywhere else.

 

That doesn’t mean Facebook users are eschewing news on the site. It’s actually quite the opposite. For news websites, Facebook is still the single strongest social traffic driver. Facebook pages for news publications feed users a daily dose of stories, and Facebook users are constantly sharing links as well. The new design of Facebook’s News Feed prominently displays stories that multiple friends have shared in an attempt to surface the most relevant posts for each individual.

 

In Facebook’s current state, news links appear within the great News Feed jumble of baby photos and personal status updates. There’s no way to organize it so you see only news links. Because of that, Facebook is less a destination for news, rather than a place where you happen to stumble upon stories shared by friends. A dedicated reader, however, could change the way people engage and view news on Facebook, especially in a mobile format. According to a Pew Research poll, browsing and reading the news is one of the most popular activities on tablets and smartphones, and social sites like Facebook are a growing channel for news discovery. Put the two together, and Facebook can earn itself a good chunk of news-hungry readers.

 

Don’t, however, expect Facebook Reader to be anything revolutionary. The company has already witnessed the success of visual reading apps like Flipboard and Pulse, and will most likely bank on a similar service. It’s also not the first social networking site to attempt to engage users through news-sharing. 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. LinkedIn’s smartphone and tablet apps also prominently display a News tab, where you can read, like and comment on stories.

 

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. 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. 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.

 

 

AOL Launches Its Own News Reader

 

 

With Google Reader’s demise looming, a host of media companies have jumped to fill the impending void. Apps like Zite have updated to take on Reader-like qualities. Digg has been racing to build its own RSS reader that largely reproduces Google Reader’s core functions. And now, AOL joins the fray with its own AOL Reader, officially launching today.

 

Like the just-announced Digg Reader and Google Reader before it, AOL Reader has a simple, minimalist design. It’s got all the features you’d expect from a robust RSS reader. Does it have anything mind-blowing that sets it apart from other readers? Not really. But it looks good, works as expected, and if you have an AOL account, you’d be remiss not to give it a shot if you’re looking for a new web-based reader.

 

Searching for news sources and adding feeds is straightforward — just tap the plus sign on the upper left of the interface. A “Settings” button next to that gives you more options, like the ability to import the OPML file for existing subscriptions if you currently use another reader.

 

AOL Reader offers four different views for browsing feed content: A simple list view, which expands a post within this list when you click or navigate to it; a more visual Google+ or Flipboard-like “card” view; a “full view,” which most resembles Google Reader’s default viewing mode; and a two-panel view that lists articles on the left and pulls up the full text on the right. I like that you’ve got these different options — depending on whether I’m on a desktop or tablet, if I’m in a hurry or if I’m feeling browsy, I can use a different view to satisfy that need.

 

You can organize incoming items into folders, and on the AOL Reader homepage, you can quickly see a selection of the most recent content from each folder. You can also tag items, making it easy to reference articles around a certain subject later on. There’s also the ability to star/favorite things, or mark them unread.

 

And because we’re nothing if we’re not constantly connected and sharing with our peers, articles can be shared in AOL Reader easily through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or via e-mail.

 

 

New AOL Reader product teased just days before Google Reader's shutdown

Once-mighty America Online appears to be working on a new RSS reader product, with about a week to go before Google pulls the plug on its own Reader.

“All your favorite websites, in one place,” the product’s landing page proclaims. The reader is currently in private beta; people can either request an invitation online or enter a code to use the service.

AOL Reader will launch and become available to everyone on Monday, a spokeswoman said. On the AOL Twitter feed, a Vine video was posted Friday afternoon depicting the landing page on a computer monitor. A series of sticky notes were pasted on top of the screen. "Yes, the rumors are true," one of them said.

No other information about the product could be gleaned from the AOL site or obtained from the company.

Besides AOL, a number of other companies have been promoting their own RSS reader services since Google announced in March that it would be shutting down Reader and some other products by July 1.

In its announcement, the company said it needed to focus on new opportunities, rather than spread itself “too thin and lack impact.”

One of the other reader players is Feedly, which earlier this week switched on its own RSS API (application programming interface) to let users transfer over their existing feeds to Feedly’s own back end.

Digg is also working on a Google Reader replacement, which is slated to go live next week, according to a company blog post.

Google Reader launched in 2005 to help people stay on top of their favorite websites using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.