Amidst rumors that Google has pulled ahead of Microsoft in the race to buy a portion of Facebook, Google News now has its own Facebook application.
You can select from five standard categories (Entertainment News, Sci/Tech News, World News, Sports News, Business News) or enter any number of keywords.
The app gives you a page featuring the top 3 stories in each of those categories (and you can select to see more, with a button to share them with your friends. You can also view stories sent and saved by yourself or by your friends who also have the application. Basically, you can use the application as a replacement for the regular Google News, as well as a means for socially sharing news with friends.
Since the application does not add a box to your profile or annoy you, you can install it and trust it will mostly remain out of the way while adding some nice functionality to Facebook. I like that Google has specifically avoided spamming your friends, selecting no one by default on the “Invite your friends” page. Hopefully Google will create a “Popular shared news” page, so you can see which news is the most popular among Facebook users.
If you haven’t already, now would be a good time to say hi on Facebook and add me as a friend.
Screenshot by Accuracast, who thinks the app will go unnoticed because it doesn’t annoy people like other Facebook apps. He’s right, in that spammy Facebook apps are more likely to succeed, but if a few users start heavily using it to share news stories, it will spread by being useful, not by taking up profile page space and messaging all your friends.
