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Facebook Launching News Reader

June 14, 2013

Facebook RSS reader

By Paul Thomson :: 6:39 PM

Facebook has sent out an announcement to the tech press, inviting them to an event to be held on June 20. Although purely speculation by many, it is thought that the social network will announce a news reader at this event.

Ever since the demise of Google Reader was announced earlier this year, many online have been looking for an alternative to Google’s popular RSS reader. Their Google Reader time was well integrated into their daily life, and while some outfits, like Digg, have jumped to try and fill the void, Facebook could be the only well in a position to help readers find articles based on their social connections.

Although privacy settings may prevent Facebook from automatically sharing what you’re reading in another tab on your browser, Facebook can use its treasure trove of data to analyze the articles that are being publicly shared, and with what frequency. This, in turn could be meshed with user interest data – likes and demographic information, to serve up a selected list of articles that a user is likely to be interested in reading.

Earlier this week, some eagle-eyed coders spotted new lines of code in Facebook’s graph search API. The code found specifically deals with RSS functions and news feeds. More fuel on the rumor file, but we won’t know anything for certain until the 20th.

One Comment
  1. Gautam Sampathkumar permalink

    Hi Guys,

    If what you want is the ability to skim large #s of
    headlines, organize lots of feeds, label them, tag articles for later
    reading in one fast unobtrusive “no magazine layout” reader, SwarmIQ is
    your choice.

    Sign up at http://www.swarmiq.com/register/GOOGLEREADERISDEAD , click on the Google reader icon to get all your feeds, and get up and running straight away.

    Disclosure: I’m on the team that built this site 🙂 Also, we don’t have “Google Alerts” type functionality yet.