Facebook working on Flipboard like news-reader app: reports

A new, news-reader app by Facebook, which is in the making would look much like Flipboard, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The report said the company had been quietly working on a service, internally called Reader, that displayed content from Facebook users and publishers in a new visual format tailored for mobile devices, the paper cited people with knowledge of the matter, as saying.

The timing of the launch was not clear or whether there would be a desktop version of the service, but for the moment it looked to be for smartphones and tablets.

Earlier, TechCrunch had reported that Facebook was working on such a service, which would launch during its 20 June event. The social network,  videos for Instagram feature.

According to TechCrunch lines of code referring to rss feeds were spotted in Facebook's Graph API code. Linking the RSS feed to a user's Facebook ID, the code schema also covered such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.

According to commentators, if Facebook were to launch an app for news aggregation, it could make a lot of sense in terms of monetisation for the site. The app could provide publishers a new platform to highlight their content from their FB pages with no worries over their their content getting lost in the often-never-ending NewsFeed.

However, the competition would be quite intense with Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and Google Currents among the endless competitors awaiting.

While most other details of the rumored project were not available, it was reportedly important enough to warrant the close involvement of Mark Zuckerberg. The WSJ was not commenting on its plans, but there was reason to believe that Reader was more than just idle speculation: the social network had recently added hashtag support as a "first step" toward helping users track topics.