Facebook Paper -- What Impact Will It Have?

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Image credits: Jon S, Flickr        commons.wikimedia.org

“You can’t be innovative if you’re encumbered by worrying if you’re going to disrupt what hundreds of millions or a billion people are doing”
~ Michael Reckhow, Product Manager of Paper.

Is Facebook becoming too arrogant?

I would like to offer a view that contends Facebook can afford to be arrogant because of its current growth phase. Dr Geoffrey A. Moore calls this stage ‘The Tornado’—the stage of Technology Lifecycle adoption where exponential growth results in the proverbial 800lb gorilla. It is the point where switching to another solution is either too costly or too disruptive because it is firmly entrenched as the standard. There are five types of user driving the Technology Lifecycle:

• Innovators – think Wozniak’s ‘homebrew’ computer club


• Early Adopters – the cool crowd who try all the neat new stuff


• Early Majority – the pragmatists who see the mainstream acceptance and join en masse to drive exponential growth


• Late Majority – those that join because ‘everyone else has’


• Laggards – reluctantly join because they have to.

Moore posits that everything that made a company successful in the early stages will destroy a company in The Tornado. In the early stages Facebook pandered to its customers’ needs, customized often, and emphasized the value of connecting with family and friends. As Moore’s theory goes, the strategy for Facebook now is ‘a land grab’—focusing on mass market growth, generic product, attacking the competition, commoditizing and growing revenues. Think how successful this model has been for the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco.

Because of the universal appeal of social networking we have to think in billions. Zuckerberg has 1.3B Early Majority on board and is now ready to kick things up a notch to encourage 3-4B Late Majority/Laggards to join the party. Enter Paper.

• Q// is Paper the new ‘Killer App’ (to coin an old phrase), that will drive the next phase of Facebook’s growth?

What is Facebook | Paper? I’ve long been obsessed with finding the ‘perfect’ content consumption experience. I believe the Mobile Phone and Tablet are the new go-to devices for most people to consume content. Think about the desktop browser reading experience in the early years. Flashing banners, ugly layout, a smorgasbord of fonts and sizes. For years I was adding a ton of browser extensions to undo all that clutter—remove ads, format text, and ‘beautify’ the layout. Since the demise of Google Reader, there have been a plethora of applications that aggregate news and blog feeds and display them in gorgeous ‘Readability/Instapaper’ glory. What a difference. And now we have phone/tablet browsers like Firefox, Safari, IE11 with built-in reading modes.

So what does Paper actually do? I guess we’ll find out for sure on Monday, but I think it addresses the following issues:

• Enhances the Content Consumption Experience as outlined above.


• Aggregates and organizes articles and stories.


• Provides a state-of-the art, engaging UI, designed to work the way we use devices—particularly Smartphones. Whether we’re walking, riding the subway, drinking a latte, one-handed operation suits our lifestyle.


• Pinterest’s meteoric growth has drawn attention to the rising importance of organizing by image rather than alpha-numerically. I think Paper’s interface mimics this idea.


• Of importance to Content Strategists, Paper’s Publishing features should help drive more compelling story content and provide a ‘permission mechanism’ to increase revenues—when Facebook uses Paper to engage users, they are worth more to advertisers.

• Q// will Paper assist in developing a story workflow—will it guide the user through stages of start, middle and end—will it have a ‘story template’? Or will it be more style than substance?