Paper 1.1 continues Facebook’s evolution on mobile

By David Nield April 19, 2014

paper 1 continues facebooks evolution mobile facebook

Facebook has pushed out a substantial update to its Paper iOS app as it continues to tweak the social experience it provides on mobile devices. Paper 1.1 adds in some of the features that were missing first time around while continuing to differentiate the app from Facebook’s standard mobile offerings.

Birthdays and Events are now available, for example, but they are placed in the notifications section rather than on the main feed. Photo comments have been enabled inside Paper, but there’s no room yet for the Nearby Friends feature that was unveiled earlier this week. Other changes include more prominent updates from your Groups and nine new article covers.

According to a blog post by the Paper team, the news feed is the most popular part of the app (where your friends’ updates reside), ahead of Headlines, Tech, Ideas, LOL and Pop Life. The app remains locked inside the US for the time being, but it looks like there’s lots more to come from this Facebook experiment. “Our vision is to make Paper the best way to experience stories from friends and the world on Facebook,” explains the blog post. “We’ve been working hard to tackle your top requests and suggestions, and we hope you enjoy the latest additions to the app.” Facebook has not revealed download or user numbers for Paper.

Paper launched in February as part of Facebook’s attempts to rethink how the social network might work in the age of Snapchat, Whatsapp, Instagram and a multitude of other smaller apps that are encroaching on Mark Zuckerberg’s territory. “We are focused on some things that overlap [with the main Facebook app],” Paper’s product manager Michael Reckhow told the Verge, “but we’re trying to stay with what we do best in Paper: presentation, and telling you the most important things you need to know on a daily basis.”

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Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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