Facebook Paper Won't Be Available in the UK

Facebook's new news reading app Paper will be launched in the US on Monday, 3 February, but the social network currently has no plans to bring the app to UK customers - as its team on this side of the Atlantic is too small.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, its team in the UK is too small at the moment to be able to maintain and curate content for the app, so for now, it will only be available in the US.

Paper, part of Facebook's new approach of focusing on standalone mobile apps, has a completely different look and feel to the original blue-dominated Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps.

While comparisons to apps like Flipboard are inevitable, Facebook says that its Paper app will seek to offer a "network that connects people to share interesting content" and offers a unique two-way reading experience to improve upon the current way Facebook is used on mobile devices.

Curated

The app makes use of the content users and their friends post on their newsfeeds, as weel as curated links to content from well-known media sources like the New York Times, Time magazine and the Washington Post, divided into different categories like Tech, Food, Science, Design, Sports and Photography.

Facebook says that the content it curates from the web will include articles from sites we know well, as well as "emerging voices".

The look and feel of the app is reminicent of Flipboard, a popular news curation app for iOS and Android with has an image-led interface, but there are also elements of iOS 7 in the design.