Social News from Grouptivity is a Facebook app that allows Facebook users to read and share the most popular news headlines within the social networking site. News headlines get voted up every time they are bookmarked, e-mailed, or shared by a user - so great headlines rise to the top!
Social News supports any number of publishers and is pre-populated with news feeds from the BBC, CNN, TechCrunch, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources. Social News, however, allows ANY blog publisher distribute their news content through the Facebook application! Bloggers that sign up as as publishers and add Grouptivity’s sharing tools to their blogs or sites, can opt to have content shared from their site automatically syndicated into Social News. Users on Facebook can then access content from the publisher by simply adding them to their list of news sources in Social News. Facebook user can click here to add Social News to your Facebook profiles. Publishers and bloggers can click here to signup up and start syndicating shared content on Facebook!
Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch did a great piece titled Grouptivity Launches Social News On Facebook on the launch of our Social News Facebook application. Schonfeld does a great job of covering the key components of Social News and concludes by saying:
Blogs that want to create a Facebook presence that goes beyond merely republishing their feeds might find this appealing. It is an implicit recommendation system that shows someone’s entire Facebook network what news stories they are bookmarking and sharing.
Webware’s Rafe Needleman did a great piece titled Grouptivity Trying to Build ‘Digg for E-Mail’, where he talks about how the company is trying to redefine the “Email This” button.
Rafe writes:
Unlike other E-mail This buttons, the Grouptivity tool sends the story to a public repository, a Digg-like site called iPond. On this site, users can see what the most e-mailed items are from all of Grouptivity’s users. iPond also helps a bit with SEO for the sites that use it, since it’s a giant page of links that, hopefully, will get used by a lot of people.
and ends by saying:
Kumar says that the users on the New York Times’ site send 50,000 “E-mail this” articles a day. If that’s accurate, adding some new functionality to this operation makes a lot of sense
