Facebook vs Flipboard: The Social Network is Developing its Own Mobile News Reader

Can they beat the competition?

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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In the world of magazine-like mobile news readers, Flipboard and Pulse are king. They are elegant apps for iOS and Android devices that show categorized news stories beautifully and quickly, opening the path for more stories to get read and shared. It should be no surprise, then, why Mark Zuckerberg wants a piece of that pie.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook is preparing to release its own news reader, tentatively called Reader, in the near future. No word if it will be integrated into the current Facebook app, or will be its own standalone app (which it will most likely will be). Flipboard currently has 50 million users, so it may be difficult to get a majority of them to sway over to Big Blue, especially since the social network has had its infamous privacy concerns, and, well, Flipboard doesn't. As the WSJ mentions, Facebook seems to be stuck in "copy-cat" mode: they've been creating their own versions of popular apps, as they did with Poke, their Snapchat clone that fell flat; and most recently with the Instagram video update, which took on Twitter's Vine. 

What is your favorite news reader now, and will you switch if Facebook does it better? 

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