CNN.com gets social

CNN.com has launched site-wide integrations of Facebook Connect and new social plugins that allow the news site’s users to recommend, share or comment on content with their friends on Facebook. The social enhancements also allow users to see when their friends have recommended, shared or commented on CNN.com content.

“It’s possible that people may be more connected with their friends on Facebook than they are to the people they see every day, and sharing what interests you most with your friends online has become a form of cultural currency,” said KC Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com.

“As one of the most trusted sources of original reporting, CNN is uniquely positioned to reinforce the connections between Facebook friends. We hope this effort will make our brand even more personally relevant to our audience.”

In 2009, CNN and Facebook joined forces and enabled millions to experience the Inauguration of Barack Obama alongside their friends directly on CNN.com. The collaboration set a new record for the largest live video event in Internet history.

The latest chapter in CNN’s partnership with Facebook makes CNN.com and CNNMoney.com even more personalised and social, reflecting users’ activity directly on the sites through several tools, such as:

Global Facebook Connect authentication
The core functionality behind Facebook Connect, which allows users to log into CNN.com with their Facebook account, integrating with their CNN Member Services profile.

Homepage Activity Feed
This is a bold move by CNN: On the right side of the homepages of CNN.com and CNNMoney.com, there is now an Activity Feed featuring a combination of actions from the aggregated CNN.com audience as well as a user’s Facebook Friends, depending on the preferences of the user.

CNN.com profile page activity module
On a user’s profile page on CNN.com, users will be able to access more friend activity data, similar to what is available on the homepage module. In addition to managing their personal settings on the site, users can see more of their friends’ activity and interactions with the site.
Recommending Story Pages, Videos, Blog Postings and iReports

Whether logged into Facebook.com or connected to Facebook through CNN.com, users are able to recommend and share CNN articles, videos and blog postings, as well as add a comment to their recommendation.

Once a user takes an action, it publishes on the CNN.com homepage personalisation module and the news feed of their Facebook profile. Moreover, if a user includes a comment while recommending or sharing, the news feed item will be more prominently displayed on the user’s Facebook wall. This feature will also display avatars of a user’s Facebook friends who have recommended the story, as well as the total recommend count.

Facebook Connect in NewsPulse
Late last year, the US edition of CNN.com unveiled NewsPulse –- an intuitive filtering tool enabling users to search the site’s most popular articles and videos by topic or keyword, as well as read, watch or share that content without leaving the NewsPulse experience. In addition to being sortable by popularity, number of CNN.com comments and time published, NewsPulse now can be sorted according to the number of times a piece of content has been recommended or shared through Facebook Connect.