Facebook announces Paper, its news-reading app

Facebook on Thursday unveiled Paper, its own Flipboard-like news-and-social application that will launch on iPhone on February 3rd. Just as previously rumored, Paper will include a variety of news sources, allowing users to customize their reading experience based on their specific preferences, but it will also compete directly against Facebook’s own mobile app.

Facebook wants to be a newspaper. And it wants you to be writing some of its best stories. To that end, the social giant announced on Thursday it will soon launch Paper, a mobile application that entirely re-envisions how Facebook users discover — and create — much of the content flowing through the massive social network. The stand-alone app is the fruit of a multi-year effort under VP of Product Chris Cox, an attempt to aesthetically and thematically rethink how Facebook presents itself to users. The project — something many insiders never thought would come to fruition — has been a particular challenge for Facebook, which has relied largely on the content distribution power of the News Feed since it was first introduced in 2006.