The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg's real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?

Digg decided to launch this new feature after it found that fans of the Digg Facebook page were visiting top Digg stories more regularly than its actual users. In fact, Digg tells us that logged-in Facebook users spent more time on the site - an average of 15 minutes vs. 10 minutes for the average user.

After users turn social sharing on from the Digg side (see above), all stories that a user reads on Digg will appear in the Facebook news ticker and news feed.

The Digg Social Reader on Facebook will roll out slowly.

After its re-design, the departure of founding CEO Kevin Rose and the eulogy that many have already written for it, this seems like a feeble attempt at getting back in. It seems like Digg is handing over what was once its prize - power users and control of social news - to Facebook.

The latest news stories display on your profile page, and by opening the app you can browse all your news feeds. You can post any news story and your comments to your profile, or send to a friend. Video and audio podcasts play inside NewsFriends.

One note: the press release has the best use of the trendy new phrase "social graph" that I've yet seen - it says that NewsFriends will allow bloggers to "expand their readership by tapping into the social graph of their current readers". Right on! Here are some screenshots:

Homepage of NewsFriends app

Adding friends

Adding news

The Pew report also notes that the number of older adults (50-64) who use Twitter or another status update service doubled from about 5% to 11% over the last year. Seniors (65+) are still lagging behind in the use of status update services, but while only about 1% of them used Twitter regularly in 2009, this number has now grown to 6%.

No matter the growing popularity of social networking services among older users, email and online news sites are still far more popular than Facebook and Twitter among this age group. Overall, 92% of all older adults and 89% of all seniors send or read email daily. With regards to online news gathering, 76% of older adults get their news online and 42% say they do so daily. Among seniors, about 62% look for news online and 34% say that they do so daily.

Earlier this month, Google tested Twitter integration with "friends" to news results, but the inclusion of multiple social networks is looking like a bold and significant change.

We saw that Google Social Search launched in Labs last October, so this development isn't coming as a complete shocker for everyone. But where they're going with it is interesting to observe. In Sullvan's post, he drills into what people are seeing when they follow the breadcrumb trail, providing a glimpse of what could be just the beginning of Google's move toward becoming a force in the social sphere: becoming a social utility.

Clicking on the "Shared by" links takes you to Google Realtime search, where you are shown all the people who are sharing that particular news story through services such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

In The Wake Of Bing & Facebook, Google Web Search Tests Getting More Social (searchengineland.com)

While today's new social features are limited to the Spotlight section, it adds another way in which Google News can personalize content for logged-in users using their social data. Google is rolling out these kinds of Google+ features across all its Web properties.

Google Web search has treated public G+ posts as search results since soon after the social network launched. Google is insisting upon making its new social layer a pervasive, personalized filter for the whole Google experience.

It's all part of an effort to redefine relevance in the way Google crawls the Web. Instead of brute rankings of the Web's content, Google has decided that personal, real-time recommendations are more relevant to us. Do you agree?

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.

News Portals Are the Most Popular Sources - Younger Internet Users also Rely on Social Networks

When online, American Internet users generally rely on 2 to 5 different sites to get their news. Interestingly, 65% of online news users say that they don't have a favorite online news source.

The majority of Internet users (56%) rely on news portals like Google News, AOL or Topix. Younger Internet users under 29 also tend to use social networks to look for interesting stories that their peers share with them (44%) and 13% specifically follow news organizations or individual journalists on social networking sites.

Only 4% of all Internet users follow Twitter updates from journalists and news organizations to stay on top of the news. News podcasts are far more popular than Twitter for getting news updates. About 15% of online news users over 18 listen to news podcasts from organizations like NPR or the New York Times.

What About RSS?

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users if they used RSS feeds and feed readers to consume news ("RSS" doesn't even appear in the report). While a lot of Internet users probably use RSS to consume news on portal sites and news aggregators without knowing it, it would be interesting to see how many people use services like Google Reader to consume news.

Sharing News

Three-quarters of all adult Internet users in the U.S. say that they get news forwarded to them by email or through posts on social networking sites. A quarter of these Internet users, however, also says that they barely ever read these stories.

Demographics

Marketers and the advertising departments for online news sources will be happy to hear that news users tend to be younger than the average population (68% are under 50 and 29% are under 30) and are likely to be employed full-time (50%) and have at least some college education (67%). Their household income also tends to be higher than the U.S. average. These users are also have faster broadband connections (84%) than the average Internet user.

The heaviest consumers of online news are between 30 and 49 years old and likely to live in a household with an annual income of over $50,000.

What do they look for?

The vast majority of Internet users goes online to find out information about the weather (81%). News about national events (73%), health (66%), business and finance (64%) and news about international events (62%) are also among the top 5 most popular categories among online news consumers . Tech news is the sixth-most popular category.

Get RWW News on Facebook

You can become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook and get our news and analysis about the changing web delivered directly into your News feed.

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

News organizations have increasingly warmed toward social media in the past several years. New York Times reporters like Brian Stelter and David Carr routinely tweet about stories they are covering and offer commentary to reactions about their reporting. Small and large outlets have used live-tweeted breaking news events and press conferences.

But the Reuters effort appears to be a major step forward in using social media to shape the news cycle. Presumably, story selection for the main news page will remain in the hands of Reuters editors.

The difference between that page and Social Pulse earlier this morning show that what Reuters editors think is important (Facebook IPO, Jobless Claims Fall and a story about the Federal Reserve, among others) is not necessarily in line with what's getting traffic on Social Pulse, which was topped by a story about a drop in Iranian currency, an increase in planned layoffs last month and a feature on Swiss watch sales.

Of the three articles at the top of Social Pulse, only one, the story about layoffs, was a Reuters story.

But News Corp plans to stick with the beleaguered social networking site, the company said, and a "major overhaul" will be finished in a few months.

News Corp bought MySpace as part of a $580 million deal in 2005. It described MySpace at the time as "the leading lifestyle portal for networking online," and claimed it was the fifth most popular site on the Internet and was home to more than 8% of all Internet advertising.

But Facebook surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network worldwide in 2008, and the original blockbuster social network seems to be falling further from mind.

Advertising is MySpace's only source of revenue and (sound familiar?) the company has historically had trouble "monetizing its large audience." But News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch insists that MySpace has a new management team and bright prospects. "We have great confidence," he said today.

MySpace is working on improving its news feed, as we reported yesterday, and introduced integration with Twitter. News Corp hasn't said when exactly the site will be changed. In the meantime, News Corp still has Fox News and DVD sales of "Avatar" to keep it profitable while MySpace figures things out.

From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.

Special thanks to Christopher Munton for camera/audio/editing work.

It appears that Google News has caught on to this (not that Google is slow on the draw) and has begun testing a Twitter integration that shows news from your Twitter "friends" on your Google News page.

The feature allows you to "connect your Twitter account to see when people you follow are talking about the news." After adding your account, you will see "a list of updates containing news articles shared by the people you follow," according to the help document on the experimental feature. Only articles that can be found in Google News already will appear in the Twitter list - so it isn't really augmenting your Google News, but rather highlighting what you would see already with recommendations by friends.

The interesting part here is that you have two preference lists converging. First, you have the list of sources that constitutes Google News, and then you have the list of people you follow on Twitter. The friends feature only shows you where the two meet. This could be especially interesting if Google allows the friends list to show tweets according to what you're looking at on Google News. If I'm looking at local news, for instance, the friends column could help float to the top the most important news, according to what my friends are tweeting.

The pairing of the two seems like a match with much promise.

Data from Google Trends suggests that the term 'web 2.0' became popular in 2005 and peaked in mid-2007 (as measured by how many times the term was entered as a search term in Google). Towards the end of 2008 'social media' started to get popular and then rose steeply in 2009.

If the above chart is to be believed, social media overtook web 2.0 in popularity at the end of 2009. I'm inclined to trust this data, as it matches other data sources we have reported on in ReadWriteWeb over the past couple of years - for example a Nielsen Online report from March 2009 stating that people spent more time in 2008 using social media than on personal email.

The 'news references' chart (the secondary chart below the main one) is also interesting. It shows that over 2009 news media organizations used the term 'social media' far more than 'web 2.0.' Partly that's because 'web 2.0' has always been an awkward term for anyone outside the tech world to understand ("You mean there were two Webs?"). But it undeniably also shows that the term 'social media' began to be bandied about in news media a lot in 2009. And not coincidentally, that's when Facebook and Twitter became very popular in the mainstream.

Nowadays, it's hard to walk anywhere in a metropolitan center without seeing the logos of both Facebook and Twitter. Last week I was in New York and snapped a photo of a local eatery promoting its Twitter account at the counter.

OK, this was New York. But I am seeing both Facebook and Twitter being increasingly used by a wide variety of businesses - online, on TV and in the real world.

The rise of social media is impacting many industries, including news media itself. Kistner points to a Hitwise study which showed that Facebook is sending more traffic to news sites than Google. This isn't necessarily true for all news sites (Google is still ReadWriteWeb's biggest traffic source, for instance), but Facebook and Twitter have become significant drivers of traffic for most news organizations.

I'm inclined to agree with Kistner that there is at least another year or two of growth in social media adoption, so 2012 sounds like a good bet for social media to peak.

What do you think, will 2012 be the peak for social media? Or will the Social Media Era last for even longer than the Web 2.0 one?

It's not, you say?

No, says Thau: Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information.

So Twitter Is "News"?

Yes, says Thau. Twitter is changing the very nature of news today. Journalists are sending their stories to Twitter and some are even publishing directly to Twitter. It's also allowing everyday users to become journalists themselves by providing them with a simple mechanism to break news.

"The guy who saw a plane land on the Hudson River right in front of him didn't think to send an email," says Thau. "He tweeted it."

Thau also wanted to assure Twitter users it's OK if you think you're not interesting enough to have your own Twitter account. Don't apologize if you don't tweet - just come to Twitter and consume content instead. After all, plenty of people already do just that. In fact, Twitter has 910,000,000 uniques, based on analytics from Alexa, which makes it the ninth largest website on the Internet, said Thau.

Twitter is not just its users (although there are 145,000,000 of those), it's also the everyday people who just visit the site and read tweets.

Besides breaking news, Twitter is also a network for discussing politics, global news, entertainment (Thau noted that Kanye's apology to Taylor Swift was one of the most re-tweeted of all time), sports, humor and more.

Twitter is still growing, too. Most of that growth (60%) takes place outside the U.S., specifically in Japan, Indonesia and Brazil. He then explained how the company's partnership with Nokia allows Twitter to reach to those and other emerging markets by connecting users to Twitter via the mobile phones they prefer.

His announcement goes hand-in-hand with the new features Nokia is launching on its N8 smartphones, which bring social news content into homescreen widgets that allow for simple interactions like reading updates and posting your status.

Just don't call them "social networking" widgets, we guess.

To help out as the New Hampshire primary rolls around, Storify has put together 10 lessons from the Iowa Caucus for using social media to report on elections. Storify is the front page of social media news, and its curation tools are employed by all kinds of major media companies. Storify's list of election coverage strategies also includes some news. Storify has just released a search tool in beta, allowing users to search across previously "Storified" elements to embed them in your stories.

On the night of the Iowa Caucus, news organizations raced to keep up with the Web to report results, but social media are always hard to filter for quality information. Storify's tools helped news organizations like the New York Times, PBS Newshour and the Des Moines Register tune in to the signal and filter out the noise. "It was deadline curation at a new level," says Storify's Jeff Elder.

Here are Storify's 10 tips. Pay special attention to the golden rules at the end.

Digg and Reddit were two of the quintessential wave of Web 2.0 companies. They aggregated news thought user submission, allowed people to vote articles up or down and built large communities of engagement. XYDO is not that much different but adds the layer of the social graph, making its user base much wider. In its private beta it had around 7,000 users whose social graphs extended to 1.1 million people, giving XYDO an incredible reach of content.

"XYDO is on the forefront of a major wave towards true personalization of the news that matters most to the people who consume and share it," said social networking author Jesse Stay in an XYDO press release. "Equipped with a powerful idea and great leadership, XYDO is poised to fill a major vacuum in the online social news space-and ultimately to change the way we discover, consume, and engage with news."

One of the problems that XYDO will have is that it is fundamentally battling the very networks it curates from. One of the reasons that Digg and Reddit are not as big as they once were is because users are getting more information from their news feeds in Twitter and Facebook.

Developing The Platform

The team behind XYDO has a lot of experience in the entrepreneurial world. Co-founder and CEO Eric Roach founded Lombard Brokerage, one of the first in Internet stock trading and was acquired by Morgan Stanley. Co-founder Cameron Brain was behind Open Box Technologies, a software-as-a-service platform to publish, store and manage video to the Web and mobile.

"Eric and I are both voracious news readers; we love news and would read dozes of blogs/news sites each day," Brain said. "After getting connected (via some mutual friends working on another project) we started talking about how we might improve news on the web, both for users and publishers; content discovery, social tools, organization, personalization, curation, etc. On the social side, we'd both been users of HN, Reddit, and Digg for many years, and believed that right now was the time to take what these sites had done to pioneer social news, and bring it into the era of the social graph, build a true social network around news."

XYDO has been self-funded to this point but Brain said they are looking to close a round of funding within the next couple of weeks.

There are nine people on the XYDO team spread across the country. Brain and Roach and a couple of developers are in Park City, Utah while the back end team is in Silicon Valley and the user interface team is in New York City. They spent a lot of time on the back end of the system to be able to accommodate the large volume of social data that they are pulling in.

As for the name, it is a steeped deep within the nerd lexicon.

"Bit of a play-off xylem and pholem; vascular structure that brings nutrients to the areas of a tree. Also x y being kind of a he said, she said, counterpoints," Brain said.