The social giant Facebook has its own popular News Feed. It's indeed useful to users that want updates about the news they like. But News feed was never that good in delivering real-time content and this can be frustrating to those that wanted fast and actual information. On November 11th, Facebook is launching an app for this. Called Notify, it's a customizable reading app for breaking news and push notification, right at the user's notification lock screen.
At the moment of its launch, Notify partners with more than 70 publishers worldwide. With this in mind, users can engage with their favorite news about sports, companies, musics and a lot more, all in real-time. Each notification is shown in the Notify app feed for 24 hours.
Initially available on iOS in the U.S. only, Notify is not featuring any advertisements. Although the opportunities for advertisers are high, Facebook is not putting any of its targeted ads the company is known for.
Its ability to deliver new and updates in real-time makes Notify compete with the likes of Twitter. The 140-character microblogging platform is well-known for its real-time engagement with highly visible tweets. What makes Notify different when delivering its real-time news is that it gives users total customization. While Twitter has a broad range of contents users, this makes both interesting and not at all interesting information are displayed. Notify on the other hand, enables users to subscribe to content topics that can be very specific thus making each content much more relevant to users.
"The key here is for people to create the mix that matters to them. We really wanted to build a platform that's diverse so that people can tune it," said Notify's Product Manager Julian Gutman.
Notify started as an idea from a small team. The original idea spark was when the team behind it thought: "Wouldn’t it be cool to know when our favorite food truck were around. Or MTA schedules or and train stuff?" said Facebook Director of Product Michael Cerda.
Facebook wants Notify to be the source of information where irrelevant clutters are eliminated. Facebook's News Feed is full of clutter and the company acknowledged, Notify is the answer for that.
When first opening the Notify app and logging in to Facebook, the app will get all the necessary information from the user's liked Pages. Then the customization starts. Notify shows whatever it thinks the user may find interesting based upon it. Called "stations", the user select whatever they'd like to follow and by having a personalized set of recommendations.
After finish customizing, the app can then run in the background to deliver push notification to the user's lockscreen. This enables the user to read what they like without unlocking the phone. If the user finds the notification interesting, a tap on the link will open the page. Users can also save it for later reading.
When opening the Notify app, a feed is presented. Any notifications that were delivered to the lockscreen earlier are shown for 24 hours. Here, the user can also see what notifications are shown from the stations they're following. The "+" button is readily available when the user wants to browse for more categories. On the screen, there is a tab that homes a list of saved notifications.
Despite its way to become a news reader and aggregator, Notify is better to be referred as a news notification deliverer. News reading apps are more than plenty and readily available to download. What Notify is doing isn't to compete with them because it's an "invisible app". Users rarely need to open it: Notify works in the background, and that is what Facebook wants it to be.
While Notify can be useful to interested readers, it's also targeting publishers to be its users. For publishers, Notify creates a way for them to send push notifications without building and popularizing their own app. This can be especially useful to publishers that don't have their own custom mobile apps yet. Ideally, this can be used for publishers to grow their audience through Notify's discovery feature.
Playing the Odds by Giving New Ways To Receive Information
Notify is launched just a few weeks after Facebook introduced Instant Articles. And its way in working in the background can be frustrating to publishers. Similar to Instant Articles, information are delivered accordingly, negating the needs for users to ever visit the publisher's website where the publishers are earning money (ads, affiliates, sponsored posts and more). So if Notify is unable to get the audience the publishers are aiming to be their readers, they might quit in producing news notification to the app altogether.
Furthermore, Notify that works by pushing notification to the lockscreen can be irritating, especially when the user opts to many active stations. Being overwhelmed with endless notifications can drive people mad. They may choose to silent the app, or may just delete it.
"We know notifications are a highly sensitive distribution channel," said Notify's Director of Media Partnerships Nick Grudin. "If you get them right, they're really awesome. If you get them wrong, they're really annoying."
Send too many alerts and the readers will turn them off. Send too few and the publisher doesn't get the benefit of delivering the news. Notify is like Facebook's big dilemma.
If compared to Twitter, this Notify's main weakness. Notify can give a relentless alert to the user. Despite the contents are appealing because the user actually wants to be alerted, but too much can be indeed annoying. Twitter's feed on the other hand, may give a broader topics which the user may not like. The strength is that not everything is giving notification.
But here's the catch: Notify is plainly different. It uses a different medium and different distribution channel. It wants to be a new way for people to receive information.
Facebook is playing the odds. If it can make Notify useful and handy to users, while at the same time able to deliver many many readers to the publishers, it can thrive well between the endless list of news readers and aggregators. If not, it will just become another standalone app like Paper and Slingshot which Facebook had trouble popularizing.
But no matter the outcome will be, Notify is Facebook's attempt to lure more users to Facebook whenever they aren't having the Facebook app open. By pushing notifications right to the lockscreen, the company is seeking ways to make the user engage with the app and their phone. With over the many downloads Facebook app has, users are more likely to "remember" Facebook and head to it whatever their reason is.
