The Wall Street Journal has been making waves in the news world lately. After the launch of WSJ Live, its very own online broadcasting service, the paper is launching WSJ Social, a Facebook based news site, to go live today.

The Wall Street Journal is not the only news organisation to be launching a Facebook site. As Jeff Bercovici reveals, several other major news networks have been approached by the social networking giant to release similar Facebook editions, however WSJ has stated that they were not approached by Facebook and that the site was entirely their own initiative.

With the Facebook developers' conference F8 on the horizon, the advent of the social news site could simply be one of a barrage of new features to be unveiled in the near future. Speculations about Facebook's latest projects have been flying around the blogosphere and include the addition of 'Read', 'Watched' and 'Listened' buttons, to show the world and share with others the media you are consuming. Social news sites would fit nicely into this media-sharing model, as would a social music sharing service, which are also expected to be unveiled.

So how does WJS Social work?

Well no one really knows how it will integrate the mythical 'read' button, but at present it consists of various streams - the official streams curated by the publication itself and the streams of other users - which control what stories are displayed on the site. The idea of streams means that the social site is personalised to each user and in turn readers curate the content of their streams, which are followed by other people.

Those users who are the most followed will receive rewards for their efforts in the form of prizes and a position on a leader board. It seems the gamification of news - which has been so often talked about - might find its perfect platform in this new social partnership.

Crucially, the ad revenue displayed inside the page goes directly to The Journal, while Facebook gets to keep the revenue from those displayed around it. While the adage dimes from digital, dollars from print still rings true for many media organisations, as 65% of all American adults now use social networks, social network news sites light be one more way to start stacking those dimes.

Sources: Editor's Weblog, Forbes - Jeff Bercovici Blog, Pew Research Center, TechCrunch (1), (2)