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.
Nice. Was just thinking this am “where’s the digg +fb connect” at that jay talked about.
This is a smart move for socialmedian, who need a larger network to share a spread content as they hope. It seems that it will benefit both socialmedian and Facebook users, and could go a long way to making socialmedian a prominent source of news among facebook users. Good for them.
Robin, correct me if i’m wrong but popurls has had news sharing for facebook long before socialmedian and digg.
True, but it’s not really a Facebook Connect integration, doesn’t leverage your social graph.
http://pophub.c...cebook-sharing/
let the integration games begin. the more these apps interchange and open social spreads the less need there to move from your “home base social site.”
pretty soon Tina Turner will be singing a new pop hit:
“We Dont Need Another Website.”
With the explosion of cross publishing tools for Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MysPace, Linkedin and webpages, how will be able differentiate spam from important information?
Seems most applications are more a spammers wet dream than a regular user’s wishes!
bad name
I see the coming of the ONE WEB or the Social web where by rather having islands of services you have every app/services talking to every other app. long way to go but.
Praveen
What is up with the MASSIVE amount of racist / junk commentary going on on TC lately? As far as I can tell Anjali seems to be a legitimate person from India and there is an army of people imitating her or attacking her in every possible way. Whether or not that’s true, the sheer volume of these ridiculous comment threads makes it really hard to actually get to any sort of interesting commentary.
Please figure out how to filter that crap out.
I totally agree — racial comments don’t have a home on TechCrunch.com. They’re quite low.
yoooo
Good to know that FB is now connecting with SocialMedian – I haven’t been using SocialMedian much, if at all, but maybe now I’ll have a second look.
Nice web service.
I think its stupid – the way they’ve launched Facebook Connect. I still need to sign up to socialmedian or merge an existing account. I would prefer if they had done it that way Vimeo has.
MSNBC-owned Newsvine uses Facebook Connect in a similar way and they are probably at least 10-20x the size of SocialMedian.
This is getting out of control.
Erick, please do something about these idiot posters.
Apparently, racism, sexism, and spamming is not enough for these idiots, now they are resorting to identity theft. I only post under my own gravatar. These idiots just hide behind fake identities.
Please put some quality control or filtering mechanism to your comments section. Otherwise, Gresham’s Law will start to play out to the detriment of everybody.
Anjali Sen
@”Babes” — Yeah, right, whatever you say. We already know you and what you do on TC, twisted spammer
This spammer could certainly be very entertaining, but I don’t really understand. She could also be, more than “peculiar,” and a dark joke with twisted intentions. Maybe TC is not the proper place for her comments.
????? yes, Erick, Robin, Michael, do this, do that,
“racism, sexism, and spamming is not enough for these idiots, now they are resorting to identity theft. I only post under my own gravatar. These idiots just hide behind fake identities.”
“identity theft” — ????
Then the threat [?]
“Otherwise, Gresham’s Law will start to play out to the detriment of everybody”
Unbelievable spammer.
besides, everyone should fear Gresham’s Law
maybe “Anjali Sen” is smoking some really, really good stuff….