Extra, Extra, Wall Street Journal on Facebook

Move over paper-boy, there's a new way to get your morning news. The Wall Street Journal has unveiled WSJ Social Beta, a novel way to consume news combining social media and their "WSJ Everywhere" strategy, which aims to make its content more ubiquitous.

The newspaper has launched WSJ Social, a Facebook app that republishes Journal content on Facebook. Thanks to sponsor Dell, all the content on the app will be free for the first month. After that, however, the app will contain the same mix of free and paid content as the WSJ's website.

The basic idea of WSJ Social is to create a news hub where you can read articles recommended by others, as well as share them easily with friends. Creating all of this content within the walls of Facebook also seems to fall in line with the social network's rumored strategy of including more original content such as music and video within the site.

The social aspect of WSJ Social is the crux of the app. For example, the stories you see depends on the likes of other readers who you choose to subscribe to. Other people can also add you as an editor, meaning they will see your Facebook likes of Journal stories. Your role then, becomes that of both editor and reader. Liking stories not only engages you with the article, but shares that content with your followers.

WSJ Social is an original way to really capitalize on the social aspect of news. Choosing the most popular social network site in the world as their platform was a good choice. Now we will see if people stick around to pay for the service, and if other news sources will start launching their own versions.

Here is snapshot of the front page:

What's On Your Phone? A Smart Phone Testimonial

By Dave Sniadak

With more than 10-billion apps downloaded since, well, the start of the business of downloading apps, it's time we all take a look at our phones and purge those apps that haven't been touched in a while.

The Nielsen Research Company recently posted findings from their first mobile media rankings for Android usage. Their findings are based solely on what Nielsen is calling apps that have 'active reach' - or the percentage of Android users who've used the apps in the past 30 days - from U.S.-based smart phone users ages 18 and up. The findings are interesting, if not telling about how men and women use their smart phones differently.

Nielsen's list of the overall Top 20 apps shouldn't surprise anyone - Market, Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook and Google Search are the first five - and the report supplements the list by breaking it out by gender. Apps like QuickOfficePro, Talk - Text to Voice and Adobe Reader imply that men might use their smart phones for work. Apps like Facebook, Words With Friends and Angry Birds tend to populate women's phones more than men, leading observers to believe female smart phone usage could be more on the playful side.

The biggest takeaway is that while millions of mobile users around the country may use their phones for a multitude of unique reasons, they're all dialed into smart phones for much more than just talking.