Notify operates primarily by pushing headline notifications to your lock screen, which link you to the content via its respective publisher.
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The social network rolled out a new app called “Notify” on Wednesday specifically to send you mobile notifications from publishers you care about, like BuzzFeed or CNN or The Weather Channel. But with a totally different value proposition – true real-time information – than Facebook itself, Notify could push people to stay connected to the news that matters most to them.
Facebook’s Notify app has been rumored for months and it has finally arrived.
But at its worst, Notify could overwhelm users with Notifications, driving them to silence the alerts or delete the app. To that end, Facebook is giving publishers detailed analytics regarding how many people receive, view, click through, share, and most important, unsubscribe from each notification. And that’s because you can get all kinds of content on Notify that isn’t news, like music videos from Vevo or daily deals from Groupon.
The thinking, according to Michael Cerda, product director at Facebook, is that mobile notifications are their own medium, separate from Facebook or any other news consumption platform.
That level of control is critical for an app built around push notifications because interruptive alerts about irrelevant sports teams, news, or entertainment would get extremely annoying.
A full list of the more than 70 launch partners in Notify is available on the app’s website.
It’s one thing to get users more engaged with the Facebook app. If Facebook can’t monetize that engagement, however, then the new feature may be damaging to its financial outlook as it potentially takes away from more valuable areas of the app, such as News Feed.
Likely attributing to making it frictionless for the reader, Facebook doesn’t route readers to its Paper app to read the article or even an Instant Article. While general Twitter accounts feature a broad range of content that might not all be interesting to you, Notify lets you subscribe only to the very specific sub-topics you care about.
Users will be able to tailor their own personal mix of notifications, while will appear on the lock screen of iPhone users, at least initially.
The Facebook poke is back, but this time there’s a bit more to it.
Facebook has been developing a deep relationship with news and media outlets in the past few years.
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As noted earlier, the app is only available for iOS right now, and there is no mention at all of when or if an Android version is in the works.
