The most innovative aspect of "Share," as Facebook's feature is entitled, is that individual users are able to take snippets of content, quotes, photos, etc., from affiliated publications to post on their personal Facebook page, adding copyrighted decoration to their digital profile. Some publishers may not welcome this, but seeing as giant houses such as NYT and WaPo have agreed to the program, others are sure to follow. 

The type of button that Facebook furnishes has been instituted by other social media such as Digg and Reddit and is becoming commonplace on many newspaper websites.

But Facebook is the first social networking site to make the move. Rupert Murdoch owns the most popular social networking site, MySpace, but has not meddled much with it, leaving its direction to its founders. There have been rumors that Murdoch will more closely integrate MySpace into his News Corps empire and he has just launched a social networking site at his most popular publication, Britain's The Sun. It seems that Facebook, which attracts a more student and young professional oriented crowd, has beaten Murdoch to the punch when integrating traditional media.

The viral nature of these buttons, through which Facebook users will be able to see what their friends are reading and easily link to those publications, should be embraced by newspapers on the Web to help attract more readers.

Source:Reuters