Facebook's latest app, Paper, signals two major moves for the world's most popular social media platform: It's doubling down on mobile while continuing its push to become a social news network.

Facebook introduced Paper on Thursday as "a new app that helps you explore and share stories from friends and the world around you," but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was Facebook's long lost news reader, in mobile form.

Facebook Paper's full-screen, gesture-based layout looks quite fetching. You navigate by swiping, which is the most natural way on a mobile device to flip through stories (a la Flipboard), and media content appears on the screen at full size.

Designed by Facebook's Creative Labs division, Paper looks a little like Facebook Home, the ill-fated full screen Facebook app that took over Android users' home screen with News Feed content and made Facebook Messaging the phone's default. That app, as well as the only phone to come with it as default, the HTC First, tanked. Paper probably won't.

That's because Paper is an example of what Facebook can do right when it tries not to get too fancy, and it includes a feature that you won't get from your News Feed in any other Facebook app.

Paper is yet another separate Facebook app that uses the overall social media platform for one or two simple things. Like the Facebook's Messaging app and Instagram, Facebook Paper parses one part of the multifaceted social platform into a stand-alone app, dispensing with the complicated task of incorporating every Facebook feature into a useable layout on a 5-inch screen and instead just giving you the News Feed in a beautiful, simple UI.

On top of that, Paper allows users to tweak what news they're reading, by picking themed sections like Design, Tech, Science, Food, etc. (also like Flipboard). This gives users more control over what they browse than the web-based news feed, and also allows Facebook to tinker with its News Feed for it's longstanding goal of becoming a social news platform without disturbing the locals. Facebook users who want the regular News Feed -- stuffed with viral content, posts from friends, and other Facebook-y things -- can go to the Facebook app, while people looking for a more "social news" experience with articles written by news media can use the appropriately named Paper.

For the past year, Facebook has clearly tried to move towards being a social news platform -- while not adding a standard RSS reader to the platform, Facebook has added Trending Topics, embeddable public Facebook posts, and hashtags. It's also tinkered with the News Feed a couple of times, looking to bring "high-quality" news content to the top of users' feeds and deemphasize GIFs and other viral content, which sometimes has backfired with its meme-crazy users. Isolating the news reading experience into the Paper app, however, gives Facebook the opportunity to tweak away, with a select Facebook audience that will probably appreciate it.

The fact that Paper is an iOS app (hopefully Android coming soon) also shows that Facebook is banking on mobile for growth and audience retention. As the company's recent earnings report -- as well as the first earnings report where Facebook silenced critics on Wall Street and surprised investors in Q2 2013 - shows, the future of Facebook is necessarily mobile. But Facebook wants its future to also be news delivery.

Paper may be the first successful attempt at combining both.