Huffington Post teams up with Facebook – talk about deja vu

Kara Swisher has news today that Huffington Post is going to be collaborating with Facebook to launch a new feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News”. The idea is that readers will be able to create a personalized social networking type page within Huffington Post itself.

I would just like to note at this point that we posted about Facebook looking to become the HuffPost of your social media world yesterday in like of their purchase of Friendfeed. This was of course the result of a larger post by Chadwick Matlin at the Washington Post where he suggested the idea

Instead, I think this is about social aggregation. Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

So it is rather interesting to see this post by Kara that has Huffington Post being the one to start the process of melding news blog sites with social media networks.

“We are looking at HuffPost Social News like a ‘digital water cooler,’ because we see news going in that direction,” said Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder Arianna Huffington, in an interview with me this weekend. “We did this, because we are interested in real identities having real conversations about news.”

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic.

“This is a natural way to expand into the Facebook community and give users who desire to engage and comment with friends more privacy,” said Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, with whom I also spoke earlier today. “And, like a lot of other sites, we are trying to make our site more attractive to marketers who want to engage with engaged users.”

Through the use of Facebook Connect and a Social News module that would appear on every page of HuffPost your activity on the news site would be sent back through to your Facebook timeline. It would also find your Facebook friends that are also reading HuffPost. Below is an example of Kara’s Facebook Module on Huffington Post

images courtesy of Kara Swisher