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FaceBook release App that gathers news and update notification to feeds

Saturday, 14 November 2015

Facebook has released an app for iPhone owners
called Notify that gathers news and
entertainment stories into one regularly updated
feed.
CNN, Fox News and the Washington Post are among
the 70 organisations providing stories to the app.
Anyone who installs the app chooses their own mix of
sources that will post notifications to their feed.
It competes directly with Twitter's Moments and
Apple's News service, which create feeds of breaking
stories.


The feed of stories could be customised by choosing
from several different categories, including movies,
music, sport, news and celebrities, Facebook said in
a post.
There are also categories for daily meditation
exercises and another from the Getty picture library
showing iconic images from the same day in history.
Currently, the Notify service is available only to
iPhone-owning Facebook members in the United
States.
Facebook has not said when or if the service will be
extended to other parts of the world or other
operating systems.
Notifications about new articles appear on the lock
screen of an iPhone and can be shared from that
display.
Mark Mulligan, managing director of analyst company
Midia Research, said the move made sense because
Facebook had become the "jumping off point into
our digital lives".
"The better a job it can do of this, the better it locks
users in," he said. "It has seen standout success with
spinning out Messenger and recognises that the more
touchpoints it can develop with its users, the more it
can create greater loyalty."
Notify comes soon after Facebook unveiled its Instant
Articles service In May. This sought to speed up the
delivery of off-site content by hosting it in its own
data centres. Articles from BuzzFeed, National
Geographic, the New York Times and six other media
organisations are featured on the service.
Instant Articles is initially available only on iPhones
but tests of an Android version have begun.
A similar, rival service called the Accelerated Mobile
Pages (AMP) initiative was launched by Google and
many other web firms in October.
AMP stored slimmed down copies of stories from
dozens of news organisations to enable them to load

faster on portable devices.

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