Facebook Paper

» see facebook.com/paper as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

paper was the kind of thing us app-store designers used. that was not my crowd, and it was not a crowd that existed in turkey in any meaningful number in 2014. the app was iphone-only and the launch app store was us-only, which meant the rest of the world found out about paper through hacker news threads and verge screenshots. i had an android phone in 2014 and a galaxy s4 was not getting a facebook creative labs ios app, ever. paper was a beautiful product for an audience that did not include me.

facebook shipped paper on february 3 2014 as the first project out of creative labs, an internal initiative meant to test specialized mobile apps without touching the main facebook app. you opened paper and got a serif-typeset top story, then a horizontal scroll of editorial sections you could add to your feed one at a time. tilting the phone panned across the panoramic photos, with a magazine-layout reader sliding up when you tapped a story. it was a designer's facebook, with the rough edges of the regular app filed off and the typography taken seriously.

the press coverage at launch was uniformly positive. design awards followed, including an apple design award nomination. paper held a top-50 spot in the us app store free chart for a few weeks. then the daily active number flatlined and never grew. the design press kept writing about it. the regular facebook user base did not switch to it. by mid-2015 the team had been quietly reassigned and the app had not received a meaningful update in months. facebook killed it on july 29 2016 in the same blog post that wound down riff and rooms.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

paper was an answer to a question facebook had been asking itself since the news-feed redesign disasters of 2013. the question was whether a more editorial presentation of the same content could change how people read the feed. paper said yes on the design side and no on the engagement side. people opened it to admire the typography and then went back to the regular app for actual scrolling. the editorial sections were curated by a small team and felt closer to flipboard than to facebook, which was the whole point but also the part that did not transfer.

~ the cracks ~

the cracks were visible by spring 2014. paper was iphone-only and never got an android port or even an ipad version. the daily active count never crossed the threshold where facebook would have committed engineering resources to porting it. creative labs itself was based on a thesis that specialized apps could each carve out their own audience, and the actual data was that specialized apps mostly cannibalized the main app's engagement without growing the overall pool.

~ how it actually ended ~

the july 29 2016 shutdown notice was a single blog post. paper got killed in the same paragraph that wound down riff and rooms. the official line was that the team had learned what it needed to from each experiment and was rolling the lessons into the main facebook app. that was partially true. the typography work in paper showed up in facebook's instant articles format a year later. the rest of paper, including the editorial-section model and the tilt-to-load photos, was quietly abandoned and never came back.

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