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Well, a few months back I broke the news & speculated about a Google app for facebook. Was it a rumor, a hoax or the truth? Well it now looks like it is official: Google News on Facebook has arrived. According to their Google News Blog they have just released this Google news application for facebook. Yipee! “Google Goes Social” is the headline.

This is a fairly nice application and it allows you to easily get news headlines and a link to the news story on facebook. The link takes you to the actual story on the internet (I just wish it popped open a new browser window). The application is fairly useful, i can select news from 5 preset categories: Entertainment, World, Business, Tech and Sports. I can also easily add news query alert by adding keywords or a single keyword. Nice! It works in a fashion similar to google alerts.

You can see the top stories from Google News for the categories that you have selected. It also displays the top stories and most popular in the right side of the home page of the application. The big drawback to this page is that I can’t reorder the news stories sections. The last one you add always ends up on top.

I can also see news stores that my friends have shared and sent. I can also track the stories that i have shared. When i share a news story from the Google news facebook application it shows up in my mini-feed. there is a link to the application and a link off of facebook to the original news story source.

On my profile page it will also display the news items in summary that I have shared. This is nice. I only wish that they also displayed the picture for the item. This would make the application much more appealing and compelling to users. They have seemed to have forgotten to add a link at the bottom of this to direct people to add the application. This will be key to making the app more viral and more people using it. They need to fix that pronto.

The canvas pages are self explanatory and easy to use: Top Stories, Stories from friends, My stories. You can also see items that your friends have shared. The one glaring omission that the Google news facebook application forgot is this: They totally forgot the Invite Friends Functionality. DUH. The news becomes more compelling if I can see more of what my friends are sharing.

Note to Google: Please add this asap. It will make the viral application usage grow by several hundred percent.

I would imagine that this application will have a fairly high long term engagement rate because people will be checking the news more frequently and when they discover friends sharing in the minifeed & news feed, it will drive traffic back to the app. Nice work Google guys!

I would strongly suspect that this is the first in a wave of applications from Google that we will see on facebook. They could lot’s of really compelling and useful facebook applications for google docs, google calender, google reader (shared items and much more), Google/YouTubeVideo… the possibilities are many and great.

It is also worthy to note that this bodes well for the long term growth of facebook. Why? Because google does not have a widget for myspace and anytime google jumps on a brand such as facebook; it is indirectly seen as an endorsement of the facebook service/brand. The fact that they are choosing to embrace and use facebook as another distribution point for one of their services actually goes directly to a point that i have been talking about for months. Facebook changes the way that I consume, discover and share content. Google just made that a lot easier for people to understand.

You can get the Facebook Google News Application Here. Enjoy!

Google News Shared Items in My Mini Feed

Shared Google News Items on my Facebook Profile

Google News: Overall Navigation

Google News: My Shared Stories in the Facebook Application

Google News: Top Stories in Facebook Application from the categories and alerts that I set up

Technorati Tags: google, google news, facebook, google facebook

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