The release Monday of Huffington Post's partnership with Facebook has touched off a quick response from Slate's Chadwick Matlin, who sees the aggregation/behavioural tracker as the future of journalism.
Essentially HuffPost Social News is going to use Facebook Connects to track the Huffington Post stories and assets you read and share. The implications are substantial for those who want greater insight --- and greater opportunities to monetize --- the practices of those consuming online media.
This application permits you to understand what your friends are consuming, too, which in this era of word-of-mouth-high-value ought to also yield useful data to produce business models.
Matlin asks what will happen if other sites develop this relationship with Facebook. What will be the social network's power in that case?
I don't know, this strikes me as pretty unremarkable. It's basically a slight variation of Digg and StumbleUpon. With this approach, the user doesn't have to actually "vote up" an article. They simply vote by clicking the link, commenting or so forth. The article is written as if Chadwick Matlin hasn't heard of either of those social news tools.
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