Facebook and Huffington Post Offer Custom Social News Aggregator

Facebook Connect, the social network's log in standard, has been a big success for the company and is seeing greater adoption across major sites. But most of the implementations so far have gone little beyond letting users log in with their Facebook credentials. But this is just the first step for the social network and a fresh partnership with news aggregator Huffington Post shows a glimpse at things to come with the HuffPost Social News site, providing users with a customized news aggregator based on what their friends like and comment on.

The Huffington Post has been employing Facebook Connect in the regular fashion since January, allowing users to log in with their Facebook account to comment on postings. The new site, though, takes it to another level and really harnesses the power of the social network. HuffPost Social News bundles only the stories on which the users' friends have liked or commented on providing for a highly customized experience. In return, the users' activity on the Huffington Post is monitored and posted on their Facebook profile.

“News has become an important element of community - something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now - expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view,” Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, wrote in a guest post on the Facebook blog.

“In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community, and conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience,” she added.

The fresh site will automatically find the users' friends who are also employing it and add the content they are interested in to the customized page. There is also the possibility to opt-out the activity tracking by going into “stealth mode” and choose what they send back tot their Facebook profile. This is one of the deeper integrations of the Facebook API and was done in collaboration with the social network and should open up some interesting perspectives for news reading and gathering but also for the Connect platform and Facebook in general.