New Facebook Notify App Shows News to Smartphones
Facebook is introducing Notify, a new app from Facebook that delivers timely notifications about new content from media partners such as Fox News, Washington Post and CBS. The app allows user to share notifications directly from the lock screen and includes a broad selection of "stations" across different categories such as sports, fashion and breaking news.
Some examples of stations include:
- The Final Scores station from FOX Sports provides end-of-game summaries for your favorite teams.
- The Daily AM Forecast station from The Weather Channel sends a local weather forecast at the start of your day.
- New Trailers from Fandango gets you the newest trailers for the movies as they drop.
- Breaking News from CNN and Top Stories from Fox News deliver the day’s news headlines.
- The 10 Best Dressed station from Vogue.
- Daily Meditation from Headspace brings bite-sized guided meditation exercises into your day.
- The Flashback station from Getty Images delivers iconic imagery from this day in history.
To create your personal mix of notifications you select the stations from which you want to receive updates. Notify also provides station suggestions based on your Facebook profile.
You’ll receive notifications, delivered right to your lock screen. If you want to see more, swipe or tap through any Notify notification to open the link in the app’s browser where you can read the full article, watch the video, or view the site.
You can also share your favorite notifications with friends via text, email, Facebook or other social networks, right from your lock screen.
Notify from Facebook is available today in the US for iPhone.
The app competes with Twitter Inc's recently launched service called Moments, which aims to provide a better way of curating and aggregating news content for users and help them follow live events.
Facebook had earlier tied up with nine news publishers to launch "Instant Articles", which publishes their content directly to the social network's mobile news feeds.
Global Government Requests Report
Seperately, Facebook today said requests for account data from governments globally jumped 18 percent in the first half of 2015.
Government requests for account data increased to 41,214, with a bulk of those requests coming from U.S law enforcement agencies.
Content restricted for violating local law more than doubled to 20,568 pieces during the same period, compared with the second half of 2014, the company said.