Huffington going Facebook: Another lesson for News Sites!

The other day I wrote about how News Sites should think of innovative ideas to reach more people in stead of cribbing about Aggregators stealing their traffic and here is Huffington Post with one bright idea!

Huffington is going Facebook with Huffpost Social News! What are they upto? As we hear from Arianna Huffington:

When you sign up for it -- and I hope you will right now -- HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best. (But don't worry, you'll still have complete control over what stories and comments are shared with your friends, as well as what goes on your Facebook wall, and into your friends' news feeds. See details at end of post.)

The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It's no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become an important element of community -- something around which we gather, connect, and converse. 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.

 Now, whoever said Links kill traffic should think again! Think of the amount space Huffington will get on Facebook if this idea clicks and people start clicking. There will be links to Huffington all over Facebook. Aren't News Aggregators doing a similar help to News Sites that give original content? Or are the News Sites one day going to stand up and say Search Engines should also pay for searching them out and showing them on the search page because Search Engines kill traffic? Bing already has a User Interface that permits users to bring up more content from the original site to help them decide if they want to go to the site or not. Google has already integrated Google News into its search results so that relevant news links come up when people search. If people only read headlines and are done with it why would experts say Google does that to subsidize people who create content? What do these tell us? Simple, where ever they are links matter and they don't kill traffic!

Image from Huffington Post