Introducing Paper
facebook.com
facebook.com
Edit: Changed "Silicon Valley" to tech...since this common feel is more about the latest trends, than geographical boundaries. Though the joke no longer makes sense.
I think it's more that they are just starting to advertise the same way that all other companies do. More and more they're evoking emotional responses from the ads' viewers, rather than listing technical features and productivity measures.
Apple was probably one of the first, really. Look at the early Macintosh ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCL1c8JCepg
I, for one, thought the video was pretty well done. If I had a Facebook account that I frequented, I would certainly be interested. Hell, it makes me a little envious of people who have genuinely interesting things pop up on their Walls (do such people exist?).
Queue up someone commenting that their feed doesn't look anything like the polish of a feed in a Facebook ad. :)
If they have smart integration with news sources / blogs (they showed BBC and the Atlantic I think) that could show me news that matches my interest but isn't spammy, this could be a reversal for them; I might not go to Facebook for friends, and Twitter for news/ more intellectual stuff.
Apple, BMW, Chanel, etc, all do it.
Correctly functioning (neither judged as good or bad) humans don't get angry and jealous at seeing imaginary people's imaginary success, or real people's real success for that matter.
They kind of are. I mean, for most other jobs, you're right--your emotions are your own responsibility. But advertising (inasmuch as it's more than simply "getting the word out") is all about harnessing peoples' irrationalities in profitable ways. And that means avoiding triggering irrationalities and biases people have that might scare them away from buying what you're selling.
For example, the last thing you want to show in a computer ad is a picture of the machine with an IDE open. Because IDEs are intimidating to a lot of people, reminding them of skills they lack ("I'm not good with computers.") And "intimidated" is not a buying mood.
(Also, as an aside, I'm not sure in which sense you meant "you," but to be sure, I wasn't the poster you first replied to.)
Framing this as a "responsibility" is the wrong way to look at it. If an advertisement makes a significant number of people feel negative emotions, it won't be effective, and what good is ineffective advertising? Who cares who's right, wrong, good, or bad? Much less who is responsible?
I'm a flawed person. I openly accept that. I don't think my emotions in this situation are unique though, and I don't think they're basis to refer to someone as incorrectly functioning. It's what we do with those emotions that make us "correctly functioning" or not.
But then, I'm in my 30s, so admittedly I'm pretty antediluvian.
Have you really never laid eyes on a typewriter?
Since it is Facebook and they are of course evil, it is obviously terrible.
However, I've long wanted to describe what you just said but haven't sat down to pull the right language from the recesses of my brain to describe how annoying these formulaic montages have become.
So, thanks for doing it on my behalf.
plus i already use pulse. one a year , and the HTC sense thing
Advertising hasn't worked that way in almost a hundred years. It's simply vastly less effective than selling an identity.
The real secret is, it works even if you hate hipsters. In fact, they know you hate hipsters, and that's why they're in the ad.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/11/advertisings_collater...
It makes me think that they missed the mark.
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_f...
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/real_men_want_to_drin...
Otherwise there's this documentary, with a more historical (and less rum-soaked) take on the subject:
I've been meaning to watch The Century of the Self for months, will definitely check out.
At the given time 25% of Facebook is taken up by various buttons and controls; there's a lot you can do and a lot of places you can navigate to from Facebook's homepage. It was obviously designed for desktop, and then ported over to mobile. After a couple refreshes the app was usable, but not exactly an enjoyable experience. So "Paper" is how Facebook would look if it were driven by designers and mobile first (if you need any more evidence that this was very design-driven, look at the marketing video. Typewriters, polaroids, naked woman in bathtub, lens flares and blur... it is, in a word, "hipster.") They also seem to have knocked off Flipboard a little bit and let you see collections of other stories. We'll see how well that takes off, but my assumption is that since it was barely mentioned it will be a minor factor in the new app, and I can't see myself using it.
The big move is from a lot of buttons and toggles on a screen to a more "swipe-friendly" UI/UX. That makes sense for mobile, but it's a big change. Something like that has to be intuitive, or it's a nightmare to use.
It's important to note that in Facebook's earnings call yesterday it revealed that mobile revenue surpassed desktop revenue for the first time ever. This new app has stories big, beautiful, and in-your-face. That means that ads will be the same way, and will likely drive a premium price. Brilliant in terms of monetization from the Facebook team.
I have the feeling that at Facebook they tend to half-ass things, like Home or the redesigned Newsfeed. They release an half-baked product and then let it rot for months with sporadic under-the-hood updates (I actually wonder why the hell every single day the main app needs a 10MB update to do what yesterday could do without problems, but that's for another time).
That's their motto, is it not? "Move fast and break things". It's hard to expect anything well designed with an engineering attitude like this.
With the different layouts and themes, they can start selling themes like Tumblr has, creating a new market for that. This trend of Facebook taking other companies' ideas is evident from the hashtag being implemented into posts. Who knows, they might even try to take over Google's search function.
FB's graph search?
Then there is Google's knowledge graph
So at the end, we as consumers are winners :-)
Consider this. HN is a website community that you trust will post quality content. Similarly FB can also be that way, but the community is your friends. If I can filter this new app so that only I only see a subset of my friends (the ones that post quality content), then this app would be different and valuable, no?
I wouldn’t call it brilliant. It’s a good move, but not brilliant.
At the same time the fact that both are in the general category of "apps for the curation and creation of content", the confusion in the market is definitely going to be there.
Curious to see how this is going to turn out...
That seems overly broad too and I suspect courts would distinguish between creation vs curation. The 53 app is about the former whereas FB's is the latter.
Also think about someone searching for an app to draw and paint. It's unlikely the FB's Paper would show up in the results. Even if it did, would most people confuse it for a drawing/painting app?
Just did a quick USPTO search and it looks like 53 hasn't attempted to register a trademark for "Paper" itself – but they have registered "Paper by FiftyThree", which would more easily pass the bar of distinctiveness: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85622666&caseType=SERIAL_N...
Having said that – I do wish Facebook had picked a name that wasn't already associated with such a well-known app.
Disclaimer: I have a dev friend who works at FiftyThree but their IP strategy is not something we've discussed.
edit: spelling / grammar
If anyone from Facebook is reading, Paperbook. Problem solved.
EDIT: There's a Universal app called Paper as well.
There was an article a few weeks ago about an internal struggle going on inside Facebook about what their product should be. Some executives are worried that it's primarily shallow (in their minds) content. They want to get rid of the memes and have people sharing more "quality" content. This is a step in that direction. They want Facebook to become the replacement to the daily newspaper. Hence Paper.
I wonder what sort of quality content Facebook execs are looking for. If most people are like me, I work a day at the office, go home, have dinner with the family, take the dog out for a poop, futz with the computer for an hour or two, then off to bed. Rinse and repeat M-F. Weekends are more interesting with family activities, but it's not a constant barrage of me skydiving, taking pictures at the beach and all that week-in, week-out. Nor do I wax philosophical because it just feels so pretentious.
I literally thought this was what that was linking to before clicking.
BSkyB (trading name: Sky) are gigantic (over £7bn yearly revenue) and have fingers in many pies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSkyB
[1] http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4804%3Arpp3...
'50% less CPU usage on the Facebook Paper page' is a nice line in a browser's changelog.
Wandering on the site, CPU goes back to normal after some time, but I couldn't find what the problem is with simple inspection (JS profiling says 99% idle).
Bug reproduced on Chrome.
Safari, which uses mp4 instead of webm, works fine :-)
The vp8 developers clearly made some attempts at optimization – profilers show a lot of time being spent in an SSE3-optimized decode path – but that's a long, slow game trying to catch up with years of significant software and, later, hardware optimization.
What's interesting is that their mobile strategy involves grabbing as much of your screen real estate as possible, with the FB app, FB Messenger, Instagram, and now Paper. I guess that was obvious when they tried the whole Facebook phone thing.
Personally, I mostly use FB for private messages from family members, some private groups, and their group event planning. I don't use it for the feed consumption.
It's a neat interface, and I hope it's light enough on the hardware that it'll be as fluid as in the video (on my iPhone 4 and One S the standard Facebook app has become slow and laggy).
But, it looks like an interface that distances the user from the content, enforcing a more consumption-focused model of interaction than producer, which seems a little antithetical.
Hopefully if it does pan out as well as the video shows, other apps like flipboard will start incorporating its flow.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.h...
It seems to me a type of app better suited perhaps to the tablet format. Personally I'm over consuming content like this on my phone. In most cases I may skim something quickly and if it really catches my attention then I'll wait until I'm on a bigger screen to explore it further.
The Share section tries to make the point of "the most important stories… your own" and it's a good one, well presented. From my own personal experience though I believe that most of the people I follow online, whether prolific or not, will not dedicate a lot of time to "production" work as in selecting headlines, backgrounds for those headers, more than a couple of beautiful pictures (they never really come out as good as presented), etc. to create a flip-book like these. This will be a good medium for… commercial producers? as shown, the CNNs, Time magazines, of course the Verge, Engadgenet, etc, and that's what I'd end up consuming only to finally uninstall.
But I know, that's just me, and my 2 cents.
I'm all for being cynical and questioning what's out there but you have to let the good stuff through. The design here is first class. The Facebook guys have outdone themselves. Yes, it's a culmination of a large body of work that's come before with a few novel improvements. That's how art works. Quit bitching and do something useful.
/rantoff
I'm not convinced that I like Facebook or any of my friends content enough to want ANOTHER channel of absorbing it. However, the app seems to be beautifully executed and the marketing page is pretty flawless. Some of the memory concerns aside, I love when companies create those kinds of landing pages. Like this one: http://www.knocktounlock.com/
I'm not at all a fan of facebook, but the design here is really solid and the marketing sells it quite well. I wonder if the Instagram team worked on this.
Of my 300+ Facebook friends, one guy consistently posts the stereotypical millenial thing described here of "beautiful hike on the coast with Sharon". If someone else started doing that, I'd probably have to cut one of them off.
Fewer friends seem to have real pictures of themselves and more have cartoons, cats and memes.
This format looks great for presenting what people imagine as a great Facebook post. But I actually think the majority of people don't use Facebook for this - the hippest are already off Facebook and, well, good riddance.
Who would create this "more"?
The nice thing about my existing news feed is that it is created by the people I either know or have a rather specific affinity to. Either way, they create stuff that actually is interesting specifically to me. And only about 5-10 of them are capable of producing video or the equvilent. Most produce essays, quips, collages and cat-pictures - not stuff with huge production values or stuff with a cinematic or whatever tone. Just relevant things.
So what would be added? Ipso facto irrelevant stuff.
I mean, my argument is that there is fundamental difference, a wide gulf, between a feed of friends' posts and a curated stream of news article, even if some friend's posts contain some links.
A friend might, say, object to my argument using a counter-argument whereas, for example, a marketing bot would respond with a stream of text all of which is synonymous with "don't worry, it will be great".
I'm not a marketing bot... I work on the Parse team. You asked two questions in your response, I answered them.
All I said originally is that it's more than just newsfeed. It was not my intention to argue a point, simply to clarify. Oh, and don't worry, it will be great.
An app? a model of phone? a website? a new facebook feature?
Stories...? Or memes and ads?
Theoretically, I am the target market for this product because it's supposed to lure me into divulging more longform-ish content to Facebook and creating narratives about it.
I was completely repelled by the ad, not only because I still don't see how this product differentiates from Facebook_regular, but because of the vast array of hipsters doing things that have nothing to do with actual Facebook. If you like photography and animation and writing in the Real World, why would you want to move that content to Facebook? If you create content digitally, why would you want to do it on anything except for a platform you own?
Moreover, I was horrified to see that woman not only Facebooking ("Papering?") in the bathtub, but sharing pictures of her fetus, which could then be enlarged by anyone who cares enough.
2014. What a world.
But I feel uneasy that we're encouraging this kind of privacy invasion from the very beginning, that leads to things like this[1]. The piece is, of course, reductio ad absurdum, but not completely out of the realm of the ordinary.
[1] http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-mommy-bloggers-lament
I am coming at the topic anecdotally (where sites like STFUParents[2] exist for people who are tired of overshare or people who have been fired or arrested for things they shared on social networks come into play.)
If anyone has links that either prove or disprove that sharing pictures of small children/sonograms is beneficial, I would be really interested in seeing them.
I just tend to skew towards guarded when it comes to sharing private medical information and pictures, especially of minors who don't have a say in whether you do or not.
[1]https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/welcome-to-facebook-... [2]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/stfu-p...
What is the issue with someone enlarging an ultrasound picture?
My point is that it's an interesting philosophical question that has a lot of implications, and I personally don't like the fact that Facebook is casually encouraging the action through their commercial, which I'm sure pushes it further into the realm of acceptable social norms.
How about: should we be questioning what other people decide to share with friends, family, the Internet? Probably not.
If you're not interested in other peoples' opinions of your content, and that's entirely your right, then I would argue that you shouldn't share it in a public forum.
Shame it's from Facebook.
Hmm, would you give an example of the "awesome design in mobile" from facebook? I hope you're not referring to their "facebook" mobile app.
Introducing %word% , bla bla bla beautiful bla bla bla Share. Coupled with short sentences over a huge iOS/ OS X images.
It feels as if this has been here forever.
[1]: http://media.fontsinuse.com/static/use-media-items/7/6475/fu...
I couldn't pause the video, fast forward it or even see any indicator of progress. I didn't even expect volume settings.
Considering all this, the page is simply horrible. It might look nice (on paper perhaps), but the UX is the worst. Visuals alone don't make good sites.
Secondly, what is the market for this? I can already make my own "paper" type thing with Flipboard or the myriad other options on the market. Considering this seems like something I need to not only download, but take time to customize, does Facebook expect people to switch right on over to them?
Why can't I just go on Facebook or Twitter and see what stories my friends are sharing? That's the point, isn't it? I don't get it.
For some reason I was redirected there in IE11, after both Firefox and Chrome crashed.
Who knows whether it will be intuitive or not. Can't tell from that video. My phone isn't as still as the one in the video,
I don't like too much swiping of little bits and pieces all the time. Tap, swipe, all day long.. just show me the content and stop making a zilion forks in the road. You're making me put my hand in front of the screen every 2 seconds, it looks like hard work to me... all that swiping and endless mashup of random stuff.
Is it news? Is it noise? Is it noisy news?
I wonder what the best strategy is, while in the past we had ugly interfaces with interesting algos (e.g., reddit), now it seems there's just UX/UI... my question is: is this a viable solution? Can you build UX first, and then complete it with better algos?
The facebook timeline is starting to feel extremely stale - if facebook can make it so its users can tell better stories then I am all for it.
I think that's fair.
Being able to deliver rich, full-screen stories to you implies being able to deliver rich, full-screen video ads to you. And that's where the money is.
This is what the Facebook app itself should be. Instead of improving their terrible news feed, they make this.
Then my browser nearly died before I could close the tab.