Facebook is reportedly working on a mobile news app, which is said to be similar to Twitter’s breaking news app. The purported app will allow publishers to send mobile alerts from their preferred news sources. The new standalone app seems to be a part of the networking site’s Facebook for Business initiative.
Since their Menlo Park-based office has failed to comment or elaborate on the rumors about the app doing the rounds, details about the entire thing are still vague. Presently, the app is in early “alpha” testing and will allegedly work.
A source at Business Insider claims that Facebook chose a few companies to pilot the app and claim to have received screenshots of the proposed app from one such source.
Based on hearsay, Facebook will give the site users to option to download the new mobile app and ask them to choose their partnering publications that they want to follow via this app. Facebook users will then start getting alerts of up to 100 characters (text) and a URL to the news article on their main news website. Apparently, Facebook has selected only a few publishers to begin with.
Whenever there is a ‘Breaking News’, these partner publishers will create mobile notifications and send them to all followers instantly, just like a tweet. When the people getting the news brief and URL see the notification, they can choose to read the entire article by following the shared link or ignore it.
But, one publication can’t choose to share breaking news published elsewhere to grab quick eyeballs – a step that will help cut down on spam and abuse of service.
