When you are scrolling through your Facebook News Feed, chances are you won‘t find all the breaking news as it breaks due to the fact that the company doesn‘t flood you with each and every published post on the pages you follow. It gets filtered to show you what you want to see at that moment.
Facebook have now launched an alternative, however, which can notify you when news that matter to you happens, when it happens. The service is called Notify, and it lets you select from over 70 publishers and customize your alerts to only send you news about specific companies, cities, sports teams, music genres and more.
NOTIFY IS DEFINITELY MEANT TO DISRUPT THE SPACE TWITTER HAS OWNED FOR A LONG TIME
They are sent to you via a push notification which will be shown in the Notify application‘s feed for 24 hours, and you can click through to read the associated link. Notify has now launched on iOS, and will be rolled out to Android soon.
You won‘t be able to have real discussion to and fro like you can on Twitter (yet), but this service is definitely meant to disrupt that space that Twitter has owned for quite some time. To be honest, it‘s probably the only reason I still use Twitter – to get the latest news worldwide, as it happens.
A real interesting part of the Notify app is that you can decide what news you want to receive on a very granular level. It lets you subscribe to very specific sub-topics underneath a broader topic or area. It also means that publishers have a new way of reaching prospective customers. Apps from different outlets have seen various degrees of success, but Notify will open up avenues many more users, even more relevant than the general audience they might get on the internet.
It seems likely that Notify is an experiment, and Facebook will use what it learns there to inform the way it builds notifications into the flagship Facebook app. But who know? Maybe Notify is so popular that it remains a standalone application for indefinitely.
Source: Facebook
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