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The Huffington Post, the unabashedly liberal Web site which offers a combination of news and advocacy journalism, has launched an initiative with social networking venture Facebook.

In editorials on its home page Monday, the Post touted the partnership as a collaboration that would “take social news to a whole new level.” It certainly has innovative elements that may change the way we participate with news, but I’m not so certain it will live up to such inflated expectations. (Mind you, I’m pretty certain I said the same thing about Twitter.)

The Huffington Post has essentially implemented the Facebook Connect product in a service which it calls HuffPost Social News. Here’s how it works: When you sign up for the service, HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading stories on the site and links you with your friends so you can, I suppose, talk about the story.

“News has become an important element of community – something around which we gather, connect and converse,” the site’s founder Arianna Huffington says in a post. “And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now – expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.”

Personally, I’m a very fast consumer of news. I like to quickly peruse articles of interest, pull out the bits of information I’m interested in, and move on to the next story. I don’t think I’d be likely to hang around on one story for very long to debate the finer details.

But then again, The Huffington Post may be an ideal venue for such a service. Those who regularly peruse the site are more apt to share similar points of view and would, in all likelihood, be apt to discuss and debate the issues.

The site claims its readers posted some 1.7 million comments last month, and that a few of the most popular articles attracted as many as 10,000 comments. With so many comments, you may miss submissions by your “friends” or people you follow. With HuffPost Social News, Huffington says “the people you care most about will see what you have to say about the stories you love or are angered by, delivered in real time.”

We’ll have to see how this one plays out, but no matter what, it just goes to show you that there are many more developments to come in this ongoing experiment called social networking.
 

Comments (1)

	1. 08-18-2009 12:44
	It is so hard to predict what will succeed and fail in this experimental world of social networking. Clearly, there's a large generation growing up talking online about a wide variety of topics. The extent of this type of activity still seems surprising to me and others that didn't grow up with it. But clearly it is changing the way people communicate and will revolutionize industries over time. I too watch developments like this with great interest. Registered

Ellen Pearlman

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