Facebook links with publishers to make news super social

Mark Zuckerberg announces news partnerships at f8 2011

Facebook on Thursday announced a host of partnerships with news publishers who have each built apps to allow their content to be read within the social networking site.

In the keynote speech at the f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new apps from publishers including Yahoo News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Gizmodo, and many others. The apps will tie in with Facebook’s new Timeline user interface as well as the new Ticker sidebar to let users read news stories within Facebook and easily share their reading histories.

Facebook has worked with more than a dozen developers to launch the news reading capabilities within the social networking site, Zuckerberg said. The apps will be available immediately, and Timeline will fully roll out within the coming weeks.

That so many traditional and online publishers have given the green light for their content to be fully replicated within Facebook, sacrificing page views on their own websites, is a big coup for Facebook. Washington Post CEO Donald Graham said in a statement today that his company expects to see better user engagement and ultimately more reading activity by putting its stories within Facebook. “If you know that several of your friends have read a story, you’ll be more interested in it. We encourage people to try it out with their friends and keep up-to-date on the news.”

It’s a bold move for the news industry, but one thing is for sure: Facebook will almost certainly benefit from keeping even more of its users daily online activity completely within the social network’s walls.

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