Facebook launching news platform Facebook Editions in September

By Jeff Hughes

With new competition looming, Facebook is looking for new ways to hang on to its now 750 million users and avoid becoming the next social networking ghetto. One way the company is looking to keep users interested is by porting news over from select news outlets to app versions that can be read while on Facebook. These news publication apps will be called “Facebook Editions”.

According to Forbes, around a dozen news outlets are signed up to have their own app version to be browsed on Facebook. CNN, The Daily and the Washington Post are examples of the starting lineup, however, don’t look too hard for the New York Times as they are hanging back due to complications with their paywall. These Facebook Editions will start being available possibly in September.

Facebook’s like button is already widespread among online news sites, and these same sites have their own Facebook pages for fans but the Editions app would probably allow news purveyors the ability to customize Facebook interface, crafting a better mini-Facebook world for readers. The Forbes writer believes that the social networking site will probably ask for a piece of revenues and ad sales generated by these special apps.

The mentioned news companies had no comment on this new social networking feature. A Facebook spokeswoman said, “We have nothing new to announce. The top media sites around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

Google+ is barely out and already has close to 10 million users. The two social networking competitors are battling out over key issues such customization, privacy, photos, video chat and Google+ apparently has a similar “Editions” idea in the works. The Forbes article quotes a news executive who said that Google was calling for partnering with “selected publishers that would offer up the choicest stories they were working on.” This competition between the two giants will most likely mean good deals for publishers and user experience as well.

Google’s +1 Button Already More Widespread Than Twitter’s Tweet Button [STATS]

by Todd Wasserman

Google’s +1 buttons have only been out for about a month, but they’re already more common than the tweet button on major web destinations.

BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform provider, analyzed the 10,000 largest sites on the web and found a 33% surge in placement for Google’s +1 button during the past few weeks. The company foundthat +1 buttons are now on 4.4% of those sites, up from 3.6% in June. Meanwhile, Twitter’s plug-ins are displayed on 3.4% of the sites.

Both Google and Twitter trail far behind Facebook, whose plug-ins, most notably its “Like” button, are on about 20% of the sites’ front pages. Note: Although the chart below lists Twitter’s plug-in as a “Twitter Share,” BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu says it refers to the Twitter tweet button.

To put +1′s growth in perspective, Facebook’s “Like” button showed up on 50,000 websites a week after the company announced a web-wide “Like” button last April. It was on more than 100,000 sites within a month. Twitter, meanwhile, made its tweet button available to publishers last August.

A Google rep declined comment on the report.

The study also notes adoption for links to Facebook Pages or Twitter feeds on front pages. Such links are much more popular than buttons, but still, more than half — 51% of the sites — have no Facebook or Twitter link on their front pages.