Facebook is about to roll out its standalone news app called Notify next week, taking on Apple News. The social media's upcoming app will deliver breaking news in real-time to users.
Notify follows up on Facebook's earlier news app release called Instant Articles for the iOS platform, which is partnered with nine news publishers: BBC News, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Bild, National Geographic, The Guardian, the New York Times, Spiegel and NBC. Plus, it seems to be in competition with Twitter's Moments, which lets mobile users get the most trending news instantly.
According to The Financial Times, Facebook garnered "dozens of media partners" to provide content for Notify, including The Washington Post, Vogue, Billboard, Comedy Central and CBS, to name a few, in its lineup. On the app, users will be able to subscribe to specific media outlets and get notifications when a registered media source publishes a story.
Compared to a typical news feed on Facebook, Notify will be able to deliver news free of clutter. When the app opens, it will only display news from subscriptions. With this, Facebook will strengthen its power on online media, not to mention the social media company has had its share of successful mobile apps such as the Messenger app.
However, Facebook's Poke and Slingshot didn't really work out, as they failed to attract a fair amount of users to keep them alive. Poke is a messaging service that's like Snapchat. On the other hand, Slingshot is a video chat app.
All the features of the Notify news app are still unclear at this point, but it seems that it will give access to an extensive range of media, from digital to video. Whether or not the news content can be shared directly on Facebook is not certain yet, but it probably will.
We'll just have to wait for next week to see what Notify can bring to the table.
