Will Social News be Huffpo's Beacon?

Is it important to you to know what news articles your friends and acquaintances are looking at -- important enough that you're willing to have them know what articles you've been looking at? The Huffington Post thinks it is. This week, it unveiled a new application, HuffPost Social News, that uses Facebook's Connect platform to let users keep track of what the people they know are reading, saying and doing on the ultra-popular aggregation and blog site.

Some people think it's just swell. Over at The Big Money, Chadwick Matlin predicts that Social News, or something like it, will be "the future of journalism." "Killer apps like HuffPost Social are the kinds of things that sites need to make them must-reads," he writes.