Following last week's release of Google Maps Profiles, the Mountain View company gets more social by designing Facebook applications which are meant to integrate the giant's technology into users' profiles. Today's utility is intuitively named 'Google News Application for Facebook', allowing Facebook registered members to get their favorite headlines straight into the profile pages. The configuration process is pretty rich, asking users to select from numerous categories including entertainment news, world news, business news or sports news. Moreover, you can filter all the stories by typing a specific keyword to get the articles based on that topic.

"Whether it is from our homepage, one of our RSS feeds, or on a mobile device, Google News seeks to connect people with the news that matters to them -- wherever they may be. As part of that goal we are pleased to announce the Google News Application for Facebook," Tina Huang and Dan Meredith, News Team Engineers, wrote on the official blog of Google News.

"This experimental application enables users to create custom sections or select from a set of pre-defined topics, then browse and share stories with their friends on Facebook. We are trying a couple things differently with this application, and it is still in beta, but we think that it adds value to the Facebook experience and to users' overall news experience. Enjoy!"

The interesting fact is that you can easily share a specific story by clicking the 'Share' button next to the articles which makes it pretty useful for the Facebook community. Imagine that this utility can also bring a considerable amount of visitors to the news publishers so I think the Facebook application has several other goals than to enable registered social network members to share stories on the web.

If you'd like to install Google News Application for Facebook, click on this link to start the configuration process.