Notify is a real-time news app that lets users subscribe to various publications – known as “stations” – for which they will receive notifications for new stories. Providers likely sorts notifications from all your favourite publishers and content creators, while stations probably groups notifications from each publisher under separate sections.
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Notify seems to be a natural extension of Facebook’s effort aggregate online news articles, such as the social network’s new Instant Articles feature that displays full stories on within the Facebook app. It’s not clear yet if Notify and Instant Articles will be directly related, but they’re related in that they drive users to Facebook’s apps for news, instead of to publishers’ own apps. Then users will be directed to the publication’s website via the notification, according to The Awl.
The publications teaming up with Facebook will be allowed to create specific notifications for the mobile platform on behalf of Facebook.
Facebook seeks to expand its functionalities to something much more than just a social network – the most popular one in the world if it makes any difference. A dedicated platform will let them hover over dozens of recent news stories at a time and have a good time in reading them.
There is nearly no media network which has been successful in establishing a well designed mobile phone app which can be rated as equal to Facebook.
With Notify, Facebook will have the opportunity to ping you with news notifications all day long, and if you take advantage of them, you’ll never really have a need to use Twitter or other news-aggregation tools again.
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Notify, besides all the above, will also be a challenge for company rival social network, Twitter, that has also launched a new feature last week called Moments, which allow Twitter curate tweets into different categories, such as sports and news.
