Facebook Unveils New Tool to Read Posts and News Users of Apple's iPhone are about to get a new way to browse their Facebook feeds and find other interesting articles that have been posted on the service: a visually focused application called Paper. The social network intends to announce the app on Thursday, although it will not actually be available for download from Apple's App Store until Monday. Initially it will be available only to users in the United States. Unlike the regular Facebook mobile app, the new app does away with buttons, menus and other distractions. The focus is on making it easy to consume content. Everything appears full screen and you move around the app by swiping or pinching the screen. Fire it up, and you see the updates from your news feed, one at a time. Photos of wide scenes like the Grand Canyon expand beyond the screen, with a tilt or twist of the phone allowing you to change your perspective to see other parts of the image. Videos start playing automatically. Longer posts appear in one scrollable chunk. Beyond your feed, you can drill down into topics like headlines, the planet, creators and cute animals, where you will see stories and visuals selected by Facebook's algorithms as well as a handful of human editors. Some come from content partners, like CNN, National Geographic and The New York Times, which have optimized the look of their material on the app. Other articles are drawn from posts that have been made publicly on the service, such as artists" photos of their work or posts by celebrities. "It's a new way to browse stories from your friends, find topics you care about and share stories with your friends," said Michael Reckhow, the Facebook product manager overseeing the project, in an interview. We hope that this helps to connect people directly to the source of the content. As a bonus for users, there are no ads. Paper, which has been under development for the past year, is the latest addition to Facebook's family of single-purpose apps, which includes Messenger for instant messaging and Instagram for sharing photos and videos. "One of the things we want to do over the next few years is build a handful of these great, new experiences," Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said Wednesday while discussing the company's fourth-quarter financial results. Visually, Paper resembles the cover screen of Facebook Home, the software overlay introduced last year that could effectively turn an Android phone into a Facebook-everything device. But unlike Home, which made Facebook inescapable, Paper is intended to transcend Facebook's previous limits. "This is really focused on content discovery and content browsing," said Mike Matas, Paper's product designer. Mr. Matas, a former Apple designer, joined Facebook in 2011 when his start-up, Push Pop Press, was acquired by the social network, and he has been working on the concepts behind the app ever since. Paper joins a crowded field of content-browsing apps, which include the established leader, Flipboard, as well as newer entrants like Inside.com, Trove, Yahoo's News Digest and Prismatic. Mr. Matas suggests that Paper is different from all of those. "There's nothing out there for displaying really rich stories," he said. I'm sure Flipboard, which resembles a well-designed digital magazine, would beg to disagree. But Paper's combination of social signals from friends and selections by human editors, an approach similar to that used by Trove, could make it an appealing alternative for Facebook users who primarily use the service to discover interesting articles and videos rather than communicate directly with friends.