newsTracker was conceived to be a news aggregator from the start – and was heavily supported by Don Graham, Washington Post’s chairman. The widget provides “Hot News Topics,” which finds the most common words appearing in news stories worldwide and creates a tag cloud from them. It also enables to share search terms with friends and get breaking news from the Post’s website.

After experimenting with another widget, The Compass, Rob Curley, Vice President of Product Development for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, gained insight about newspapers’ use of Facebook apps.

Says Curley: “I didn’t fully understand that you don’t need the vast majority of the Facebook community to like something in order for it to really work. It’s such a big place, you only need some of them to want or like it.”

“Our biggest misconception was that the Facebook crowd wouldn’t want news content.”

Read here for a Q&A with the Post and USA Today about their use of widgets.

Source: Rob Curley blog