Facebook’s Notify News App Could Launch Next Week

Facebook’s upcoming news app ‘Notify‘ could launch as early as next week according to The Financial Times. Notify will be the social network’s new standalone app that will deliver real-time news updates to your device. 

Facebook has partnered with dozens of media outlets including Vogue, Mashable, The Washington Post and CNN. With Twitter having a firm grip on breaking news and being known as the place to be to get breaking news the fastest, Facebook also wants to get in on the action.

The app will allow users to subscribe to specific news organisations and then you will receive a notification when news breaks. Facebook wants to be “the place” to go online for everything and an app which pulls in breaking news from multiple sources would even remove the need to get notifications from the main news app themselves.

The Notify app will follow the official rollout of Instant Articles. This is Facebook’s tool which loads articles quicker than ever before, instantly. However it is interesting to note also that I have personally only seen Buzzfeed use the instant articles on my own Twitter feed, every other news publication I have is still not using it yet.

We are told however that publishers are rushing to support the new instant article feature so it may be a case that we start seeing it appear more regularly from news sources soon.

Twitter knows that they have to move to keep a grip on what they have built so far before looking to build more. They recently rolled out Moments, however the Moments feed is only available to users in the U.S. and there is no indication on when Twitter may expand further.

Maybe Facebook’s new app may force Twitter’s hand and push them into expanding the Moments feature, especially if Facebook decide to go global with their app straight away.