Hands-on with FB Notify, a push notification news app

Facebook released Notify, an app for reading customizable breaking news, info, and entertainment push notifications right on your lock screen.

Notify 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.

Each is sent as a push notification and shown in the Notify app’s feed for 24 hours, and can be clicked through to read an associated link.

Notify becomes available on iOS in the US. It doesn’t offer the real-time discussion and independent voices of Twitter, but could provide an alternative for Twitter lurkers who just wanted real-time information and aren’t interested in building another audience to broadcast to.

Though Notify won’t feature any ads for now, there are certainly opportunities to offer sponsored suggestions for accounts to follow. As long as Facebook can get enough of its 1.55 billion users on Notify to justify the work publishers are putting in to produce content there, it could create the real-time, urgent, high-signal information channel the News Feed could never be.