Facebook has grown A LOT since I first signed up and it was open only to a few colleges. When I recently realized you could play Words With Friends directly through the site and I was thrilled! Nothing worse than sneaking a word in while at work or class and avoiding your boss or professor. Well beside little add ons like that you can now read the Wall Street Journal directly though the website. A lot of power sitting within one tab of your favorite internet browser. May seem like oil and water, WSJ and Facebook but I think its a good look, hopefully it will be a positive union with the addition of this app. Check out the full story on the integration of the Wall Street Journal and Facebook after the jump.
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The Wall Street Journal launched a new Facebook app today that allows people to read the publication’s content exclusively on the social network.
As you can see from the Dell and Intel logos in the screenshot, the app is ad-supported. This is an interesting twist considering that the bulk of WSJ content is now behind a paywall.
The app, called WSJ Social, filters the publication’s content through Facebook’s social graph to yield a collection of news tailor-made for each person.
“[I’m] really excited about news apps on Facebook and how it has the potential to change the reading and news consumption experience on the platform,†said Facebook Journalist Project Manager Vadim Lavrusik on his Facebook wall.
The app itself features articles that are arranged in tiles that consist of a thumbnail image, a headline and a few smaller thumbnails of people who have “liked†that particular link. At the top left-hand corner, the news app displays the total number of WSJ stories you’ve liked and saves them for later viewing. Beside the “likes†link is another “readers†link, which lets you follow particular editors and such. I’m not entirely sure how useful this feature will be because I don’t know any WSJ editors — especially any that frequently use Facebook.
