HOUSTON: Social networking giant Facebook is reportedly working on a breaking news app and plans to call it ‘Notify’. Reports suggest Facebook will launch the app by the end of October.

The app will reportedly allow users to aggregate their favourite content into real-time notifications.

Partnering publications will have the ability to create specific notifications for the mobile platform on behalf of Facebook.

The social media giant seeks to expand its functionalities to something much more than just a social network.

The app will allow users to subscribe to certain organisations dubbed as ‘stations’. Users will then receive notifications every time one of the stations they have subscribed to, promotes a new story.

According to statistics, nearly no media network or company has managed to establish a well designed smartphone app that its readers – or most of them – actually use; at least nowhere near the capacity of Facebook.

The new app will let users read more articles through Facebook media networks with strong app presence, such as BuzzFeed and the New York Times, which may consider working with Notify to direct the firehose of social media users in the right direction.

Notify will come as a challenge to Facebook’s rival social network, Twitter, which also launched a new feature last week called Moments. Twitter’s new feature, released in the U.S., lets it curate tweets into different categories, such as news, sports etc.

So media companies will also have a chance to create their own moments and fill the feature with their content which will ultimately attract more readers and hence users as well.

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