Facebook has become my newsreader. It is a merging of:
- social news (both of and from my friends) - major news sources (a fan of Washington Post, New York Times, etc) - industry news (your network tends to share circles around particular topics, from tech to sports to pop culture) - breaking news (whether on Twitter or Facebook, news moves quickly and often through the real time web. Today alone, dozens of posts about the Dow breaking 10,000, the rumored Playfish / EA acquisition, and so forth)
Now that Facebook has moved beyond social sharing and continues to grow ahead of Twitter, tools need to open up both on *and* off Facebook.com to allow for better management, commentary and finding of articles and news.
I once spent several hours setting up my Google RSS reader... and haven't logged in to check it for months.... because the content all exists in some format within Facebook. The Google Reader toolset however, doesn't and the sharing / commentary functionality would help news-hubs on Facebook that are relevant to my network, their activity (sharing, reading, commenting, etc) and across Facebook's much-larger network. The "Facebook Notes" feature is partially there, but imagine Facebook News (news.facebook.com) that merges content and commentary across friends, fan pages (like the New York Times) and public content. And while people spend time 'grouping' their friends, it is done on a person or geographical basis - more important though would be on a content basis: social, applications, news, sports, etc.
Meanwhile, news sources like HuffingtonPost should continue to do the reverse by innovating atop of Facebook Connect. And by adding a social layer to their content, HuffingtonPost itself becomes stickier and they see an increase in traffic from the integration.
There are also mobile implications here since the Facebook App should at least allow for improved sharing (such as email a note / URL - perhaps blog it, share it directly, etc). I am regularly within the feed - either on my iPhone or computer - and find myself wanting to share that content and open a private discussion around it. On mobile, the only current option is to comment and like:
