 This is Ellis Hamburger with The Verge. My Facebook newsfeed is a bit of a mess. Especially on my iPhone, where digging through updates from friends, news sites, and ads just isn't that much fun anymore. Facebook thinks it is the answer with Paper, an iPhone app that's part newsfeed, part newspaper. And it's totally ad-free. Welcome to Paper. Paper started as an experiment to make Facebook look better on your phone. There's no chrome, and the place of buttons you navigate with swipes and other gestures. Perhaps most noticeably, Facebook's iconic newsfeed has been flipped over. Each story takes up the whole screen, and you browse them horizontally like in Facebook Home. This means you can't swipe through your feed as quickly as you can on, say, Instagram. But that's kind of the point. A lot of the designers on our team have a traditional graphic design background, and so we started looking at it like you do, like a printed book with a baseline grid going horizontally across all the stories. And as you flip, all the text stays aligned, the photos stay aligned, or if you're going vertically like this, everything has to pull out of frame, and it's a little bit more disorienting. So as you're going horizontally, it's just a lot simpler transition. The updated newsfeed is terrific, pairing a slick interface with super responsive gestures. It's easy to keep track of stories as you swipe through them since profile pictures, text, and photos are always in the same place. No more swipe tap, swipe tap, swipe tap like in vertical newsfeeds. As much as I like the new newsfeed, however, it still won't make your friends' spring break pictures any more interesting. So the company didn't stop there. By swiping over, you can reach the app's news section, a completely new effort from Facebook that blends Twitter, Flipboard, and RSS. The section collects posts from top news sites like CNN and the New York Times, but also posts that Facebook's editorial team wants to draw more attention to. Tapping on a story unfolds it Flipboard-style into a full-screen article view. People are sharing more and more things on Facebook, and they're coming to Facebook for more and more things. So they're not just coming to see what their friends are doing, they also get the news or they follow that restaurant that they're interested in or an athlete that they like. And so as you get more and more of these things, you want some breathing room to get space and be able to know that if I want to know what happened in the Australian Open last night, I can go to the score section and it's going to be there. Papers' news section isn't as good as Flipboard or dedicated news apps like Circa, but it should provide plenty of stimulation for people who already rely on their Facebook feed for news. Paper is gorgeous, but feels like an odd fit for Facebook's current ecosystem of apps. Paper includes notifications, friend requests, and Messenger. There's also a new timeline view that presents a far prettier Flipbook version of your life versus Facebook's main app. Setting aside events and groups, Paper does just about everything Facebook's main app does. It feels like the app Facebook wanted to build, but was afraid to push to its hundreds of millions of mobile users. The main Facebook app is one of the most, if not the most popular app, and lots of people really like it. And so we don't want to tell people what they should use. We don't want to come and rearrange people's furniture. We just want to put out this app that our team thinks is really great and hopefully anyone who agrees can use it how they'd like. Back in the old days of web portals, an era which birthed Facebook, having everything in one place was valuable. But not anymore, especially on mobile, where people want tightly packed, intuitive apps that do one or two things well. Paper still does a whole lot of things, but it's explicitly built for a mobile world. And it's also great for news reading, something many people have come to rely on Facebook for. Especially on mobile, the screen is like the size of a business card. And fitting a whole world inside of a business card is a challenging task. It requires design innovation as well as engineering innovation to make it so when you're looking at something that small, you feel like you're looking at something really big and expansive. Paper might be too intimidating for many of Facebook's billion users, but there are some great ideas here. This is the mobile Facebook I've always wanted.