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Today, a mere 48 hours before Facebook's f8 Conference begins, the Wall Street Journal has launched a Facebook app called WSJ Social. According to the most credible chatter, Facebook plans to unveil a media-focused redesign at the upcoming developers' conference, which bears the slogan "Read, Watch, Listen" - a fairly obvious clue. The WSJ has decided to preempt that launch.

The app presents a grid of WSJ stories, though some of the slots are occupied by ads. In the left sidebar, users can subscribe to "editors" - who can be WSJ staff or other Facebook members using the app - to customize the story feed. Currently, the stories can be viewed in full for free from within the app. The New York Observer's Anna Sanders - who was cool enough to be invited to the WSJ Social launch party - reports that the app will go behind a paywall after the first month, despite the fact that it is (heavily) ad-supported.

Starting July 1st, Starbucks will finally begin to offer free and unrestricted Internet access over Wi-Fi in its stores. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz made this announced at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference today. With this, Starbucks finally joins the ranks of neighborhood coffee stores all over the world that have long offered free and easy access to Wi-Fi. By Fall 2010, Starbucks also plans to give Internet users in its stores free access to paid sites, including the Wall Street Journal.

Checking-in at a venue around town with the Foursquare mobile location app could now come with a thought provoking payload: a news link related to the place you're at. The Wall St. Journal announced today that as a part of its new focus on covering New York City, links to Journal stories about various locations will now be offered as tips when Foursquare users check in.

Some media observers have been critical of the partnership, focusing on the addition of a few new WSJ-related badges that Foursquare users can now add to their collection. That might seem like an underwhelming feature for a media giant like the Journal to add, but the addition of location-specific, hard news stories as tips is a very intriguing experiment that could point to a big new future for news. It also looks like a lot of fun.

Where do you get your news from? While there's a lot of reasons to visit Twitter online, it's essentially a place to learn about what's going on in your world. For the first time last month, the site saw more unique visitors than the websites of both the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal.

Tameka Kee noticed the numbers via traffic analysts Compete.com and posted about them briefly on PaidContent today. Traffic numbers are fickle but Compete competitor Quantcast puts Twitter even further in the lead.

Thomson Reuters, the U.K.-based news service, released News Pro today, a new application for the iPhone, iPod touch, and Blackberry that gives users easy, almost real-time access to Reuters' news wire. We spent some time with the iPhone version of the application today (iTunes link), and while we like the fact that the app gives us easy access to a lot of great content, the application itself could use a lot of polishing, especially when compared to some of its closest competitors from the Associated Press (iTunes link) and Bloomberg (iTunes link).