Social networking giant Facebook has sent out press invites for its upcoming 20 June event. The invitations for the event were sent through traditional postal mail instead of using any online medium.
The invites were first spotted by ABC News and read out: "A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product." The mysterious invitation from Facebook did not hint anything much about the company's upcoming big product.
[See the invitation here]
The corner of the invitation has a coffee stain, similar to the kind that happens to a newspaper while reading and enjoying a cup of hot brew. However, the coffee stain and recently announced Twitter-like hastag indicates that Facebook might announce a News Reader. The hashtags might be the company's first step towards News Reader.
"Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We'll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months," according to Facebook blog post.
"To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics. As a first step, we are beginning to roll out hashtags on Facebook."
"When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic," the blog read.
A report by TechCrunch claims to have spotted some codes of Facebook RSS Reader on the Graph API.
"This code could be part of the new product, but it also may be unrelated, having to do with a user's own posts being an RSS feed, rather than a user reading feeds produced by others," the report said.
If the report and the expectation are indeed true, than Facebook's announcement of the so-called News Reader is well timed with Google RSS reader which is scheduled to be called off on 1 July.
