Facebook announces Paper news reading app; coming to the iPhone on February 3

Facebook has finally announced Paper, the **news-reading app** that will be available on the iPhone from this Monday onwards. Check out this video, the company released to show us what Paper is all about. Paper will pull in news stories, photos, and videos that are shared by your friends on Facebook, but there’s clearly a Facebook Home influence at play because everything is displayed in a photo-heavy layout. Users can create their own feeds too by picking from a list of publishers and publications that Facebook has tied-up with. During yesterday’s Facebook earnings call, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg did hint at more standalone apps being developed by Facebook. The company is also hiring **human editors who could help curate content in Pape** r, though nothing in this regard has been confirmed by the company.   Paper is very similar to Flipboard in many ways; stories open like a piece of folded paper springing up and there’s quite a few animations seen in the video that reminded us of the older app. Everything you share will be displayed in a card-style view with images clearly being the main focus. Big visuals have been cleverly put to use by Facebook and you can simply tilt the iPhone to view all of it, instead of scrolling left and right.   Translucent menus and soft glow around icons, make it look very iOS 7 and the app will be exlcusive to iPhone at the moment, with no word about an iPad version or one for Android, the most popular smartphone platform in the world. Although considering the Android app for Facebook is still not on par with the iOS app, we can stop holding our breath for Paper; something tells us it won’t be on Android for a while.