The Huffington Post announced their site’s latest innovation on Monday, HuffPost Social News, a tool it developed in collaboration with Facebook. The new application will allow users to log on to the news site with their Facebook username, and then tracks their activity on the site and shares it with their Facebook friends. Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post‘s founder and editor-in-chief, described the new feature in a post to the site as a “digital water cooler.”
HuffPost Social News will use Facebook Connect (an application which allows you to sign into websites using your Facebook id) to coordinate the sharing, and report to friends any stories read or commented on. Kara Swisher, writing for All Things Digital, included this sample page in her article on the new tool.
This is Facebook’s second major move this month: on Aug. 10th, the networking giant bought FriendFeed, a content sharing site that reports the online activity of its users (Facebook updates, tweets, Diggs, etc).
The Huffington Post predicts powerful synergy between social media and the news. “We now engage with news, share news, react to news-news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse,” said Huffington in her announcement.