Facebook's Paper vs. Flipboard: Comparison

How each story is told is as important as the story itself," begins the promovideo for Facebook's new much-hyped Paper app.

The app mixes curated news feeds with your Facebook timeline to create a platform that integrates news discovery and sharing into your timeline.

SEE ALSO: How to See When Someone Unfriends You on Facebook

With its tiled layout and gesture-based user interface, it feels very similar toFlipboard's suite of apps. We put both apps side by side to see how the two stack up. Here's how they compare:

Design: Tiles And Gestures

Let's start with where these two apps are most similar: design.

Both use a tiled layout that displays news in a grid. But while Flipboard's design puts content first, Paper puts Facebook first, emphasizing interacting with your Facebook friends and timeline whenever possible.

Flipboard and Paper have different approaches to news curation.

IMAGE: FACEBOOK, FLIPBOARD

Both apps rely heavily on gestures for navigation. But while Flipboard primarily employs one type of gesture, swiping up to "flip" through pages, Paper uses an array of tapping, swiping, pinching and dragging. Paper's gestures are more complex than Flipboard's, yet the app still manages to feel more fluid and intuitive. Details like tilting your device to pan around photos make it obvious that the app's designers spent a lot of time trying to create the best user experience possible.

News: Curation vs. Aggregation

When it comes to finding and reading news, the two apps take very different approaches. Simply put, Flipboard is an aggregator while Paper is a curator.

Flipboard, with its customized RSS, topic-based feeds and themed magazines, places importance on personalization first, discovery second. 

Paper puts discovery first, telling users what stories they should pay attention to

Paper puts discovery first, telling users what stories they should pay attention to, while emphasizing interacting with friends on Facebook.

Users can subscribe to the app's topic-based news sections, create customized "magazines" based around their interests, or use the app like an RSS feed to subscribe to specific sources.

Flipboard and Paper have similar layouts but Flipboard focuses on aggregation while Paper emphasizes curation.

IMAGE: FACEBOOK, TWITTER

Paper also offers curated topic-based sections, but instead of categories such as "Entertainment" or "Sports," Paper's sections are focused on broad themes.

There are 19 sections to choose from, each with a buzzword-filled description (e.g: Creators: "Visual delights and inspiration from artists around the world," Glow: "Style, substance and beauty that's more than skin deep," etc.). But, unlike Flipboard, which has no limits on how many news feeds a user can have, Paper limits your sections to ten, one of which will always be Facebook.

Here lies another key difference between Paper and Flipboard. While both offer curated and topic-based sections, 

Flipboard ultimately gives users most of the control by allowing them pick and choose the sources and topics they see

Flipboard ultimately gives users most of the control by allowing them pick and choose the sources and topics they see. Even in Flipboard's curated sections, users can mute the sources they don't want to see.

With Paper, Facebook controls the sources. And, beyond choosing which sections are of interest, the user has no control over which stories or sources they see. While Paper's editorial team pulls stories from top-tier sources, this approach could be less useful for someone more interested in niche topics.

Getting Social

Sharing and social media integration is at the heart of any news discovery app. Unsurprisingly, social media integration with Flipboard is much more subtle, while Paper puts Facebook front and center.

Facebook may be venturing into the news curation business with Paper, and it may be one of the first of many standalone apps from the social media giant, but the company is still very much emphasizing Facebook as the vehicle for news curation and discovery.

Paper transforms the content of your timeline into elegant tiles while also pulling in articles your friends have shared or commented on. While the clean, streamlined look of Paper is completely different from any of Facebook's other apps, Paper is still very much "a Facebook app." Just about anything you can do with Facebook's app, you can do with Paper. Everything from messages, notifications, account settings and timelines are seamlessly integrated into Paper.

The app does fall a little short on the sharing front. Predictably, Paper only integrates with Facebook and sharing is limited to your Facebook friends (although you can save stories for later via Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard or your Safari Reading List).

Both apps emphasize photos when sharing content from Facebook.

IMAGE: PAPER, FLIPBOARD

Flipboard, on the other hand, is excellent at sharing. With Flipboard, users can pull in updates from a range of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and LinkedIn, and share the news they find on any connected social network. Viewing social media feeds from within the app, however, is more of a mixed bag. Social media updates, particularly text-centric Facebook statuses and tweets, simply aren't very visually appealing in Flipboard.

Facebook Paper review, how to get it in Australia

PAPER by Facebook is the social network's attempt at jumping in the online news ring, by allowing you to display and read stories from all your favourite news sources right in your newsfeed. The result is something beautiful.

It starts when you first open the app. You're not greeted with a big Facebook logo, but by a simple, attractive Paper logo.

Paper was originally meant to make Facebook more attractive and to help it become the "personal newspaper" that Facebook was always intended to be. Indeed, Paper certainly feels like it has done that in the most part, but it works differently to how you're probably used to using Facebook.

Instead of your singular newsfeed, you now have multiple - your first being the traditional newsfeed where you can see your friends and pages you have liked in a very photocentric way that is much more intuitive and requires you to scroll left and right, rather than up and down like you're used to.

Your stories and pictures from your newsfeed are displayed side-by-side like this. Source: NewsComAu

On top of your regular newsfeed, you now have several other feeds that you can swipe to. These feeds can be from one of 20 categories like Headlines, Technology or Pop Life and display news stories from popular outlets in each section.

While at this stage it seems like Facebook has a set amount of publishers it is displaying content from, it has said that in the future it will pull stories from all over the Facebook network that it thinks is worth sharing.

Headline articles under each section are shown over the top half of the screen. Source: NewsComAu

Unlike the original Facebook app, there isn't a refresh button, posts just keep flying in as soon as they get posted. The back button has also been killed and instead been replaced by a simple swipe, a far more intuitive way to interact.

Paper shows that Facebook realises that, in such a connected world, people care about more than their friends cat, and want to see what's important in the world. It's a leap in a new direction for Facebook, and perhaps is what is needed to continue its relevance in the social space.

Unfortunately Paper isn't officially available for Aussies, and is only on iOS. Lucky for you, though - news.com.au has a work around.

1. Open the App Store, tap "Featured", scroll to the bottom and tap on your Apple ID

2. Tap your ID, then "view Apple ID".

3. After putting your password in, tap on the option to change your country and region - opt for the United States version of the store.

4. Agree to the new Terms and Conditions and change your payment method when asked to 'None'.

Awesome! You can now get Paper. If you want to go back to the Australian store after you downloaded Paper, just follow those steps again but change to the Australian store instead.

Paper a sleeker version of Facebook

Is it possible that Facebook created a better mobile app for perusing its social network than, well, Facebook?

On Monday, Facebook launched Paper, an app that combines key features of the social network with a news reader, packaging it all together in aFlipboard-style layout.

Paper is drastically different than the standard Facebook app available on the iPhone, and in some ways, it might be a lot better.

When you launch the free app, a video kicks in to give users a sense of what they're getting themselves into with Paper. Because Paper is so different from the traditional Facebook experience on mobile, voice tips follow every move to help users get comfortable.

Then, users select a series of sections to go along with their Facebook News Feed. Categories include Headlines, Tech, Score (Sports), Pop Life (Entertainment) and Flavor (cooking). In total, users choose between 19 sections.

The first section houses the News Feed. The top half features a larger photo that cycles updates from friends, while the bottom half displays the News Feed as a series of rectangular panels users can swipe left to right. Normally, users will see 2-3 at a time, but they can expand their view to check out their Feed one update at a time.

If users come across a link they like, they swipe up to go to that page, and a swipe down returns them to the News Feed. Users check out photos by tilting their phones left or right, or turn their phone to landscape view for a better view, like the standard Facebook app.

On the main feed, swiping down will also access your Profile, Create Post to update your status, Settings and Edit Sections. The upper right of the screen is where users check out Friend Requests, Messages and Notifications.

Swiping the larger image left to right flips between sections, which feature a combination of stories and tweets from notable names in their respective industry.

It's hard to believe, but Paper makes the Facebook News Feed more interesting to explore. The Flipboard-style emphasis on photos makes thumbing through images shared by Friends more appealing. It's like reading a newspaper, only your friends' activity is mixed in with the stories of the day.

There are a few things Paper could do to make the news reader portion of the experience more inviting. There doesn't seem to be a way to customize the sources for each section, outside of just hiding stuff you don't like. It would also be nice to have an option to create your own, personalized sections.

There are also some limits to what you can update through Paper. For example, users can't update their cover or profile photos within Paper, so it's best to hang on to that Facebook app just in case.

Paper might not be for everybody. If you're not a fan of Flipboard or similar apps, you can always stick with the official Facebook app. But Paper is a gorgeous alternative.

Facebook turns 10 but Death is Near.

The candles on Facebook's 10th birthday cake will barely have been blown out before someone somewhere starts speculating on whether it will ever make 11.

If a glut of recent studies are to be believed, its days are definitely numbered. Various reports suggest it is haemorrhaging users, that teenagers find it boring - one survey even comparing it to an infectious disease.

Such surveys, usually accompanied by a picture of boss Mark Zuckerberg looking sad, are picked up widely by the press and equally vigorously pulled apart by Facebook.

So when researchers at Princeton used Google search data to predict Facebook would lose 80% of its users within three years, the social network hit back.

Continue reading the main story

Are reports of Facebook's death exaggerated?

• An EU-sponsored Global Social Media Impact study concluded that teenagers felt embarrassed to be associated with Facebook and that it was "basically dead and buried".
• In November the Pew Research Center reported teenagers were growing weary of having to sustain relationships with their parents on Facebook
• In November, investment bank Piper Jaffrayreported the percentage of teenagers using Twitter had overtaken Facebook for the first time
• Princeton researchers used Google data to predict Facebook's imminent demise, describing it as an infectious disease
• iStrategyLabs reported the number of teenage Facebook users was declining while the number of those aged above 55 was booming

Its in-house data scientists used the same methodology to predict the university would have no students by 2021 and the world would run out of air by 2060.

"As data scientists we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal - and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions," they said.

The Princeton report's comparison of Facebook to an infectious disease missed the mark, thinks Nate Elliott, analyst with Forrester Research.

"One of Facebook's greatest strengths is its practice of regularly adding new features and functionality to its site; this both ensures it infects new users and also makes sure existing users don't become immune to its charms," he said in his blog.

He also pointed out net measurement firm Comscore's data that showed that 89% of US 18- to 24-year-olds used Facebook in November 2013.

"Facebook claims far more young users than any other social network - indeed, probably more than any other media property on Earth," he added.

Older demographic

Facebook has been through several redesigns since it launched in 2004

Some surveys are harder for Facebook to shake off, though.

Digital agency iStrategylabs used Facebook's own social advertising data to extrapolate that three million US teenagers had left Facebook in the past three years.

It was echoed by earlier research conducted by the Pew Internet Centre research, which reported that teenagers were put off Facebook because of their parents.

The fact that notoriously capricious teenagers don't want to hang out in the same digital space with their parents will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who knows any.

Parents can be embarrassing on Facebook - they post pictures of their offspring that they find hilarious but their children don't, they add ill-advised comments to their children's status updates and they often fail to understand the basic etiquettes of online discourse.

Facebook may be getting older, but Mark Zuckerberg still looks fresh-faced and care-free

It has led, concluded Pew, to teenagers maintaining lower profiles on Facebook while spending the majority of their time on services such as WhatsApp or Snapchat.

But while the report noted a 25% drop in the number of younger users, it indicated that there was an 80% surge in users with an age of 55 and above.

So is it a case that as Facebook gets older, so does its core audience?

"The demographic has shifted and it is a positive thing when it come to ad revenues. These older users have more spending power than young teens," said Ovum analyst Eden Zoller.

But she added Facebook could not afford to be complacent about its younger members because if they could be persuaded to stick with the social network, they would become the spenders of tomorrow.

"Facebook needs to keep innovating with things like mobile video apps, with mobile commerce," she said.

Speculation about whether Facebook can maintain its audience and its appeal are not likely to be giving Mark Zuckerberg sleepless nights anytime soon.

Especially since he got an early birthday present last week in the form of record results.

The network he started in a Harvard dormitory room, where ironically teenagers were its only demographic, now has 1.23 billion active users.

Its revenues jumped 55% to $7.87bn in 2013 while profits grew sevenfold, bringing the annual total to £1.5bn.

Interestingly, teen decline was off the agenda in this quarter's earnings call, in contrast to the previous one, when chief financial officer David Ebersman did admit it was losing some of its younger audience.

Shortly afterwards, Facebook's bid to buy Snapchat failed, so this time around, the social network was concentrating on the positives - mobile advertising.

This brought in a whopping $2.34bn, over half of its total revenue, with the firm promising to further improve data tracking and the usefulness of its ads.

Anyone bemused by why their newsfeed is serving up cures for baldness when they have a full head of hair or miracle diets when they are stick-thin will be pleased to hear that Facebook is working to make ads more relevant.

"Facebook is often criticised for how much customer data it mines but actually it isn't doing it very effectively," said Ms Zoller.

"The targeting simply isn't very good."

And as Facebook plans even more mobile advertising, it absolutely needs to make a much better job of it if it, she thinks.

"Mobile adverts have the potential to be incredibly intrusive unless they are very well targeted," she said.

Human curiosity

Is it curiosity that keeps people on Facebook?

Among all the surveys speculating about Facebook's future, there is surprisingly little analysis about why people keep using it.

In a recent status update, Facebook's communication manager and former BBC tech desk editor Iain Mackenzie summed up why he thought it endures.

"Today people have shared the birth of their first child, wedding, hooked up, broke up, mourned, outed themselves, said something dumb, said something profound, confessed that life's got too hard for them, been brought back from the brink by a friend, or a stranger, found a job, posted something that lost them their job, learned a fact that will save their life one day, found their new favourite song, and hit 'like' on a cat picture - all on Facebook."

Its appeal could boil down to the fact that it taps into that most basic of human characteristics - curiosity.

Whether we like it or not, Facebook has become the digital novel of people's lives. And for many, it remains essential reading.

Facebook celebrates 10th birthday

Facebook started as a way to help us maintain our relationships. But after a decade, many of us can describe our own relationship with Facebook in the same way: “It’s complicated.”

You might be a casual user or someone that checks it multiple times a day. Or you may have tried it out and decided to break up with it. Or you might be the stubborn abstainer who has never signed up, despite mounting pressure from family and friends.

Whatever the case, chances are Facebook has touched your life in some way, perhaps even maintaining a blow-by-blow account of the events of your life since you joined. After all, as company stats point out, Canadians are the most active users of the social network in the world.

If we were actually friends with Facebook, on Tuesday we would receive an event reminder that the world’s most ubiquitous social network is turning 10, and we should post a message on its profile wall.

However, since the service is supposed to be limited to people 13 and older, technically it wouldn’t be allowed to join its own party — unless it fudged its own birth year, like many young people have done to get on the site.

Now that’s a perfect example of a small element of our lives that Facebook has changed. Forget a phone call or a card; it is now customary to give friends a birthday shout-out on their feed. It’s also an example of how other social networks are still trying to copy Facebook’s success.

We’re looking at you, LinkedIn: stop trying to make the work anniversary a thing. It’s not going to happen.

Everything from dating to having kids to grieving has been impacted by being on Facebook. From finding lost loves or being the place to creep on exes, it is also the on-demand high school or university reunion — with the added benefit of not actually having to talk to anybody. It has reunited many families but has also been blamed for breakups and divorces.

From the sharing of photos, videos and viral memes, Facebook now wants to sell you things, tell you about the news that you care about and be a huge content aggregator for everything that is happening online, all while tracking your likes and finding ways to use that info.

Facebook’s most fundamental achievement is that it has indeed made us more connected. Remember the old six degrees of separation theory that connected any two people in the world? In 2010, Facebook researchers found that it was actually 4.74 degrees and likely getting lower as more people join the 1.2 billion users on the site.

It didn’t start that way. When it began, MySpace was the buzzy social network, which took the mantle from Friendster. Facebook’s birth tale is now modern-day myth. On Oct. 28, 2003, heartbroken Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg got drunk and created a site called Facemash, which asked users to compare two female dormitory ID photos and decide who was more attractive, similar to Hot or Not. It attracted 450 users and more than 22,000 photo views in its first four hours online.

Despite almost causing his expulsion, it was an inauspicious precursor to a website that would change many people’s lives and, more importantly, how we share our personal information.

But even in the early days, while Zuckerberg had more modest expectations, he was remarkably prescient.

In a June 2005 interview with System Seminar TV, he said his goal for the site, then called “The Facebook,” was not “an online community but sort of like a mirror for the real community. So The Facebook for your school isn’t somewhere where people actually go to meet but where you go to see who knows each other and maybe sort of an icebreaker.”

Over the past decade, it has more than broken the ice and has evolved into more than just a network, but a platform that aims to be a hub for all actions online. And as it has grown, so has the way we use it.

“Every day, we are humbled to learn the unique ways people use Facebook to connect with the people and things that matter to them,” says Jordan Banks, managing director for Facebook Canada. “There are 14 million Canadians using Facebook and meaningful connections are happening from coast to coast, from registering as an organ donor to recovering lost pets after the Calgary floods, to helping people find shelter during power outages caused by the ice storm in Toronto.”

These days it rides shotgun on many people’s lives, a big difference from when it started.

“I think one of the big changes over Facebook over the last couple of years is the way we can speak on it,” says Aimee Morrison, a professor of English at the University of Waterloo, who studies how people present themselves on social networks as autobiographical acts of self-representation.

“Whereas the site used to offer a release for some of the things that we wanted to talk about in our lives, Facebook is becoming more and more like real life, so we have to become more aware of the audience that we are speaking to and be more careful about the kinds of things we say, so it’s less like sitting on the couch with your spouse and more like being in front of a classroom lecturing.”

According to Sidneyeve Matrix, associate professor of media at Queen’s University, part of its success is tied to the rise of the smartphone.

“I think from the very earliest days, it encouraged us to buy a smartphone, because then we would have all of our friends in our pocket. And remember, 10 years ago that was like a science-fiction concept. And now more people are using it on mobile than from desktops and laptops anyway,” says Matrix. “That is a pretty amazing change.”

But Matrix also thinks that the massive growth — and the other companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram that have followed — have helped train us to partition off our social networks.

“Over the past three years, the amazingly loud message from my students is that young people are very conscious of their privacy,” Matrix says.

“They understand data privacy; they partition all their uses of social networks. Some are for professional, some are for personal and some are for school, some are for friends only. And so it seems that everyone has their own personal social media strategy and Facebook’s in there, big time, but it’s not serving the same purpose, and even though if Facebook wants to be the default web, and do everything from school to jobs to family photo sharing, we’re not necessarily going to use it that way.”

That push-pull relationship with privacy has been one of the ongoing fights between Facebook and its users. And it was not helped by the release in 2010 of an earlier instant message exchange in which a then-19-year-old Zuckerberg mocked his users. He bragged to a friend that he had access to more than 4,000 users’ emails, pictures and addresses, because “They ‘trust me,’” ending the exchange with “dumb f---s.”

Of course, that has now changed to public outcry — ironically, mostly on Facebook feeds — every time the company adjusts the “terms and conditions” to make the social network more public.

Morrison notes that when it started it was a closed network, with strong default privacy.

“Now it is a publicly traded company and, as its default, open privacy and a revenue model based on data mining and advertising, so it has come a lot more in its business model to resemble broadcast media forms, and less the plucky dorm room upstart, and I think that’s a really significant change,” she says.

Since its successful IPO in May of 2012 — one of the biggest in technology and Internet history — the bottom line and continued growth has become ever more important.

While countries like Canada have pretty much reached the saturation point for Facebook, the company still sees huge potential growth around the world. In August 2013, Zuckerberg started Internet.org, a consortium that includes phone and networking companies with the goal to get everybody in the world online.

“Facebook’s next step is to continue making the world more connected. One of the many ways Facebook is trying to achieve that is through Internet.org, a global coalition dedicated to making Internet access available to the two-thirds of the world not yet connected,” says Banks. “Through this collective effort, our goal is to remove barriers and offer billions of people the power to connect with one another.”

In technology terms, the biggest change in Facebook is that it has gone from being a network to a platform: it used to be mostly about connecting people; now it’s a tool that other companies build things on. While it started as a supposed icebreaker, one only needs to look at hot dating apps like Tinder — plus many popular games that you play against friends — which require you to sign up with your Facebook profile.

The audience for the platform is now massive, but can Facebook keep up the momentum?

There are now reports, almost daily it seems, warning that teens are fleeing the network or not signing up to begin with. Although for every doomsaying study, there’s another that shows it’s doing fine.

“At my school, most kids ask if you are on Instagram,” says Mo Dhanjal, a 14-year-old from Brampton. “Facebook is kind of an older person thing.”

Instagram is indeed the place where many younger people are fleeing, but that is no worry for Facebook, which purchased Instagram in April 2012 for $1 billion in stock and cash.