Socialmedian just made an interesting announcement about connecting its services to Facebook in a big way. As of about an hour ago, you can log in and participate on socialmedian with Facebook Connect, which is a noteworthy move considering the fact that socialmedian was recently acquired by European business social networking service Xing, news we broke in December last year.
Socialmedian is essentially a personalized news filter that integrates well with social networking platforms. It aggregates news articles from around the web, blogosphere and social services like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Google Reader, FriendFeed, etc. which are then filtered by topic. Users can pre-define which keywords and topics they’d like to receive news on, and they can also submit articles to the site with the help of a bookmarklet. Stories can be viewed either in chronological order or according to popularity on the network.
As of today, the service works both ways as far as the integration with Facebook goes. Once connected to the social network, users can now instantly share news with their Facebook friends, if they have a socialmedian account that is. As far as I can tell, this is the first social news service to use Facebook Connect in this manner, but Digg CEO Jay Adelson has hinted in the past that FB Connect might be the future of Digg, so expect news to come from them about a deep integration soon. Or not, of course (an announcement has been expected for some time but for some reason all remains quiet).
I asked socialmedian founder Jason Goldberg about the Facebook Connect integration, and why they went for it.
Socialmedian has always been about the news filtered by your network. The fact is that for most people around the world, Facebook is THE Network. While there has been some nice early adoption of Facebook Connect amongst blogs and pure content sites, as far as we are aware socialmedian is one of the first social networks to give the social network over to Facebook — let them take care of the profiles, the registration, and the social-graph, and we’ll stick to what we do best: the news filtered by your network.
He also hinted that there will be more initiatives launched from within Xing this Spring that will turn it into more of an open platform rather than an island, which should make it compete more effectively against LinkedIn, which is making its way in the European business social networking scene lately.
