The Washington Post today announced its Social Reader app for Facebook, which includes news stories from over 30 publications, has been ported to Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS (iPhone and iPod touch, but not the iPad), and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. You can download each respective app flavor for free: Google’s Android Market for Android devices, Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, and the Amazon Appstore for Android for the Kindle Fire.
Five months ago at Facebook’s 2011 f8 developer conference, the company’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to Facebook’s updated Open Graph apps as “rethinking the whole way the news industry works.” The Washington Post was one Facebook’s first 17 partners (there are many, many more now).
Since then, the newspaper’s Social Reader app has grown to a readership of more than 11 million. It has also continuously been adding new content partners. The latest include Newsweek & The Daily Beast, FOX Sports, The Atlantic, Rodale Inc.’s Men’s Health and Women’s Health, The Stream on Al Jazeera, Stiff Jab, cityeats.com, Gazette.Net, and others. International publications have also recently joined the app, including The Independent, breakingnews.ie from Ireland, and Bollywood Life, and Cricket Country from India.
“Making Social Reader mobile is more important than ever, considering that over 11 million people currently use it on Facebook,” Vijay Ravindran, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of The Washington Post Company, said in a statement. “This mobile launch is just the first of many enhancements we’ll make, as we continue to develop the app.”
While there has been quite a backlash against Facebook’s news apps among tech-savvy readers such as ZDNet’s, the apps have been doing quite well among the general Facebook population. Publications have seen massive increases in traffic. Apparently The Washington Post has seen such positive results that it actually put in the mobile development effort to see if it could get even more readers.
See also:
- Millions of Facebook users embrace the Open Graph for news
- Facebook Open Graph news apps have two major problems
- Google Chrome extension lets you bypass Facebook news apps
- Facebook: 1000s of journalists are already using Subscribe
- Facebook’s top political articles for 2011
- Would you use a ZDNet Facebook app?
