REBECCA E SPITZER

So, the Huffington Post added a “social news” feature back in August. Forgive me, I’m a little late to the party. (I have been late to the party on a lot of things these days, but better late than never, right? I’m catching up. There are just too many things to keep track of when you’re also trying to take classes and hold down two jobs and run a few organizations, but I digress.)

I’ll let Mashable sum it up:

Powered by Facebook Connect, Social News shares stories you’re reading with friends, produces stats on your habits and lets you track the content others are interacting with.

The new application didn’t quite receive rave reviews (FastCompany says it sounds “a little stale and uninteresting”) but Ariana Huffington set the record straight:

This new platform lets our community of engaged users easily share stories and post comments for friends to see–it’s HuffPost’s version of a digital water cooler, enriching and deepening conversations around the day’s news. Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse. HuffPost Social News makes this more dynamic than ever.

I really think this is a direction that could help save news organizations. We’re all very interested in what our friends are up to; it’s certainly the first thing I check when I get back to my computer. I only turn to the news after I’ve read everything I can about people I actually know. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get people interested in the news again by making it social? It’s certainly feasible technology.

Interestingly, FastCompany also said:

…In my experience, it’s in open-forum blog comments that one finds the most interesting discussions, both positive and negative, serious and funny. The open nature of the threaded comments means you can share your opinions with both friends and strangers alike, and that makes for a dynamic debate, in pretty much real time. That’s true whether it’s a news blog piece, or one about some new technology. I’m not convinced that adding in a Facebook friends angle really adds very much. Typically, blog posts are about discussing things with new people, not people you already know. Still, with social networking suffering explosive population growth at the moment, one will probably end up “friends” with half the planet before too long, so that whole public/private issue will seem less relevant.

Personally, I find open-forum blog comments interesting, but discardable. I don’t fully consider what strangers have to say; I at least don’t give as much thought to their commentary as I do the commentary of my friends. Why do blog posts have to be able discussing things with new people? New people are interesting, yes, but the connections we already have with old people make our dialogue with them even more meaningful. Right here, I kind of want to sing the song I was taught in Montessori school at age three: make new friends, but keep the old/one is silver and the other is gold.

Furthermore, I don’t really see the explosive growth of social networking leading to one being friends with half the planet, even if that is a gross exaggeration. At least on Facebook, I’m still only friends with people I know IRL, and I’m certainly from the demographic expected to devour social networking like there’s no tomorrow. They’re people who have opinions and thoughts that I’m interested in. On Twitter, of course, I follow a lot of people that I don’t know, but who also have opinions that I’m interested in. They’re people that I’ve come to trust for information; thought I don’t know them IRL, I kind of feel like I’ve come to know them. I’m also interested in what news articles they’re reading and what their comments are, much more than I’m interested in the random stranger. Quite frankly, I think integrating news and our social networks is bigger news (no pun intended) then we think.

On a less serious note, wouldn’t you love to block out the inane comments of a lot of folks? Have you read the comments on a YouTube video recently? It’s almost disturbing.