Huffington Post does 'social news' with Facebook

The Huffington Post has launched a new "social news" feature that deepens its integration with Facebook. It's a move that the site founder Arianna Huffington hopes will increase engagement and advertising revenue.

The Huffington Post has been using Facebook's Connect service since January. Connect allows sites to use Facebook authentication and for users to bring their network to the sites they use. Huffington Post readers can sign in to comment using their Facebook accounts and post their activity on the site back to Facebook.

The social news feature on the Huffington Post shows your comments and can show articles that you've read. Similar to Facebook's news feed, you can see your friends' activity on the the site including what stories they have read, comments they have left and votes they have cast on the site.

After you've joined the service, a "Social News" box is added to the right column of the site. You can choose to hide your activity using the 'stealth mode' so your friends won't know when you're looking at those NSFW photo galleries. You can toggle easily from stealth mode to public mode directly from the "Social News" box.

Site site's founder and namesake Arianna Huffington said the service will "turbo-charge your online conversations and connections, and allow you to build and develop a community that follows what you read and care about".

Huffington said that users posted 1.7m comments to the site last month, with some stories attracting well over 10,000 comments. But she added: "The one drawback: it's sometimes hard to keep up with it all."

Kara Swisher, author of the BoomTown blog for Wall Street Journal, called the service Facebook "Connect on steroids". Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau told Swisher that the site hopes it will bring in more advertising, but he added, they will need to get people to use the service first.

This is a logical move for the Huffington Post. CNN had great success when it added Facebook Connect to its streaming video of Barack Obama's inauguration. The social network said that 600,000 status updates were posted to the CNN.com live Facebook feed.

This type of social filtering will also make the commenting experience easier to manage for users. It will allow conversations to occur amongst friends in the context of the larger flood of comments, making it feel less overwhelming. Depending on how tightly knit one's Facebook network is, it can also improve the social experience because friends will have the feeling of speaking to one another.

For Facebook, it expands the walls of its garden a bit.

With success stories like CNN's and with the Huffington Post showing the possibility of working directly with Connect, one wonders why more news sites aren't adding the feature. Some possible explanations are that traditional news organisations often like to buy or build their own technology. They might also be wary of ceding control to Facebook.

The New York Times has built a service called TimesPeople that does similar things to the Huffington Post's Social News. You can also post your TimesPeople activity to Facebook, but it's a separate service. Within months after launch, it attracted 100,000 users, but from my experience with it, it's not used much. Having said that, I only have a handful of 'friends' on the site.

I'm not a regular reader of the Huffington Post, but that said, I tend to follow topics of interest and read anything on that topic regardless of the site. I don't usually read the comments on the Huffington Post site. The only time I have commented was from a post linking to my personal blog.

I'd be interested to hear from regular readers of the site if they are planning on signing up and using the social news service. If you do sign up, let me know how you find it and if it's driving you to use the site more.