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.

The feature set actually makes for a compelling social news app. It puts WSJ staff and everyday users on the same level, and users curate the curators in addition to liking and sharing stories. The format of the story grid and the articles works well on a tablet.

It's not what I would call a terrible interface, but it is a Facebook app. It does have a fixed frame of Facebook ads alongside it that periodically refreshes its wares. It also displays threaded Facebook comments on the right side of the article window, taking up almost half the frame. It's a distracting presentation, but at least the comments are relevant.

One troubling feature, common to many Facebook apps, is that WSJ Social demands that you turn off secure browsing before you continue. Upon your next login to Facebook, your secure connection is restored.

Can Paywalled Content Be Social?

The obvious question raised by WSJ Social is whether the "social" moniker can honestly apply to a paywalled app. Sure, when the paywall goes up, Wall Street Journal subscribers will be able to share stories with each other, but they won't be able to share with anyone else. The New York Times paywall allows anyone in through links shared on social networks, but that's not how the WSJ works (Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times).

It's worth noting that Facebook announced an upcoming program for select news partners called Facebook Editions in July. It hasn't yet launched, but the reports in July suggested a September timeframe. The WSJ is conspicuously absent from the partners who were named. The Daily, another News Corp. publication, is on the list. Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network, told Forbes that this app was developed independently of the Facebook Editions projects. "This is totally a Wall Street Journal initiative," she says.

What do you think? Would you subscribe?

Free Access to Paid Content

The free access to paid content sites, however, is the big news here. According to Starbucks, this new service, called the "Starbucks Digital Network," will give users who surf the Internet from U.S. company owned stores access to "various paid sites and services such as wsj.com, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, local community news and activities, on their laptops, tablets or smart phones." Besides the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks' partners include Apple's iTunes, The New York Times, Patch, USA TODAY, Yahoo and ZAGAT.

While Starbucks did not release details about these partnerships, it is easy to image that in-store Wi-Fi users could, for example, get free access to specific songs on iTunes and be allowed to bypass the New York Times' upcoming paywall restrictions.

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.

Previous Foursquare media partnerships have been limited to delivering lightweight content like nearby restaurant reviews or stories about Olympic competition in Vancouver. The Journal is inserting good and bad news, though.

Check in at the Mark Hotel on East 77th and you'll see the following, with a link to full coverage: "This 83-year-old landmark property's $200 million makeover is facing deep financial woes. Note the top-floor suites, which the hotel is struggling to convert into private residences."

Hanging out at Goldman Sachs HQ? "The SEC has sued Goldman Sachs for fraud related to sub-prime mortgages and the collapse of the housing market. Goldman is fighting the charges."

That's pretty cool. Of course lightweight tips about baseball games and museums are included as well. A representative from the Journal tells us that the tips are added by hand (not automatically) and that the company is very interested to see what will happen when nearby breaking news starts intersecting with check-ins.

If this experiment proves successful, we can only hope the idea will be expanded on by these companies and others. From public records, to social media to archival and current news stories - there is a rich depth of information tied to locations in any city that new tools could help unlock.

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.

Kee attributes the surge to last month's Oprah, Ashton, CNN lovefest for Twitter. We suspect that is just one of a number of factors. Twitter is also really useful, fun and captivating.

Of course Facebook is much, much bigger - but for some reason non-users tend to take Facebook more seriously than Twitter. It's probably the Harvard connection and the similarity with MySpace. Twitter is a different animal. It's more interesting.

And now it's more visited online than the New York Times and Wall St. Journal sites. That's pretty incredible. Of course Twitter doesn't create original content. Does it?

We found the PaidContent post via NY Times designer Jeremy Zilar (on Twitter) who was passing it along from the Twitter account of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. The Lab posted a video tour of the New York Times R&D lab this morning, where the very forward-looking newspaper giant is exploring ways to deliver its content to new devices, to satisfy advertisers in a changed media world, and to aim (presumably) not lose to Twitter as the news outlet of the future.

The Times is watching Twitter closely. The Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) has been key to Twitter's success. The NYT has released a bevy of great APIs of its own. Tomorrow the company will announce a new up-to-the-minute view of all its stories called Timeswire, linked to from the front page of the site. PR for that product said "Think Twitter & Facebook redesign." That product is built on top of the company's newswire API. At a news room strategy meeting yesterday the company said it "believes [it] can create significant revenue streams from APIs." That could well be the future of news.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times. We also use Twitter a lot to do our jobs. Twitter-reporter picture by Scott Macdonald, originally for our post How We Use Twitter For Journalism.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Jolie Odell.

Currently both apps are available for free (with ads), but Thomson Reuters is looking into a subscription model as well, though according to PaidContent, it will be a few months before we will hear more details about this.

iPhone App Needs Polish

We have seen a number of impressive news applications for the iPhone from prominent players like the New York Times (our review), Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the BBC, and Bloomberg. Sadly, the Reuters app turned out to be one of the weakest applications in this group.

Let's start with the good news. While a lot of the other apps tend to take a long time to start up and update their news feeds (though the Bloomberg app also starts up and updates quite quickly), the Thomson Reuters app is ready to go within seconds.

Unlike all of its competitors, though, the Reuters app starts up with the Top News feed by default, and presents the rest of the news categories in a long list, without the ability to customize the order of these categories. If you want the app to show you the latest 'Internet News' when you start the program, for example, you are out of luck, as you have to flick past the stories in the 'Top News' section first.

All the other apps also allow users to set shortcuts to their favorite sections, while the shortcut menu in the Reuters app is static (News, Pictures, Video, Markets, and Stocks).

In terms of presentation, the image section is nicely done, but the videos look blocky (even with a fast connection) and the Bloomberg app does a way better job at showing information about the stock market.

Verdict

The app has a lot of potential, especially thanks to the excellent and timely content that Reuters is able to offer. Sadly, the iPhone app currently falls short and doesn't quite deliver the experience to complement the quality of the available content. It should be relatively easy to rectify some of these problems, though, and we hope the see a new and better version of the app soon.