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News apps on Facebook

Posted: 20/07/07 By: Oliver Luft

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South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper has joined the Facebook fold and developed an application to enable users to put its news on their profiles.

In May this year Facebook opened up its systems to allow developers to build add-on applications (apps) to complement the social networking site, deepening its credentials as a social tool and sending the amount of people signing up to the service into over-drive.

News groups keen to get in on the act set up group profiles, allowing them to establish friends' networks. Some even used profiles as a proxy-publishing page.

News groups, like Mail and Guardian, looking to get onto the pages of Facebook users, however, have busied themselves developing their own applications (apps) to feed news directly onto profiles.

"If it proves to be popular we'll add some more apps such as gig guides and movie reviews etc. If people like it, we'll also make the current one more customisable and add financial data such as stock quotes to it," wrote Matthew Buckland, general manager of new media with Mail and Guardian.

Other news developers have baulked at the idea of using Facebook as a proxy-publishing site, seeing it as missing the site's aims.

"The very last thing we would want was for the Washington Post to look like Pat Boone rapping," wrote Rob Curley, vice president of product development for Washingtonpost.newsweek Interactive, in May.

His team set about developing apps that would have the editorial values of the Washington Post without recreating it on another platform through feeds. The logic, he says, is that not many college students are likely to just want Washington Post headlines on their profiles.

"Clearly, one of our biggest challenges was going to be coming up with things that felt like they belonged on both washingtonpost.com and on Facebook," he wrote.

The app that was developed, The Compass, was a simple survey asking a series of questions, the answers to which swayed a needle on a visual representation, plotting political leanings across the range Liberal to Conservative.

Compass

A second app then allowed US users to chart their friends’ leanings geographically.

Map

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