Washington Post promotes sharing in FB

NetNewsCheck reporting: The Post’s social reader launched last September at Facebook’s F8 conference as a new platform experiment with a simple enough idea: Users download the app and tap into a deep wellspring of content from The Washington Post and a broad array of other media properties include Slate, the Daily Beast and SB Nation. Each time the user reads a story, it’s published to the user’s timeline and among his or circle of friends.
“You can see what your friends are reading on it and they can see what you’re reading,” said Vijay Ravindran, senior VP and chief digital officer at The Washington Post Co. “By creating that visibility into everyone’s reading, you find lots of interesting stories because they’re themed through the lens of what your friends have read.”
A unique quality of the app is that all of its content lives within its own interface, Ravindran said. The Post has full syndication rights to all of the social reader’s content, so the app isn’t sending readers off to outside links.
Having initially launched the app solely within Facebook, the Post recently opened more pathways to find it through the iTunes store and Android market, and Ravindran said that using the reader on a mobile device also keeps all of its full content through the single Facebook interface.
Straightforward enough, right? The Post takes the current tools for social sharing — all those buttons for Facebook, Twitter or other networks or email that users normally find attached to any news story — and instead embeds a growing virtual newsstand right into Facebook itself. The user reads something, and the message automatically gets sent up to the timeline.

Friends see headlines they’re more likely to care about, users get convenience and the Post gets…?
Not money. Ravindran said that the Post has no plans to monetize the app for the moment, and nary a display ad pops up nor a revenue stream trickles through its interface.
“Right now we’re running an experiment to see if we can build a new type of engagement, a new audience to read our content, so the entire company is behind seeing this off and seeing how big it can be,” Ravindran said. “We know there will be good businesses behind it if we can build a great enough product with a large enough audience.”
But if the monetization schemes lay beyond the horizon, there is one thing that the social reader is garnering plenty of for the Post: Information. Internal metrics track every nuance of user behavior and access to users’ profiles serves up additional reams of information, kind of like the ultimate reader survey that keeps feeding more information with every click.
http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/2012/03/05/17341/washpo-app-nets-younger-demo-inside-fb