This morning The Huffington Post launched "HuffPost Social News," which will allow readers to create personalized social pages within the site using Facebook Connect.

Kara Swisher noted on her All things D blog that the news site was already making use of Facebook Connect, but said this puts the platform "on steroids."
While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, this kind of innovative deployment on the Huffington Post is actually a very big step for the site, especially as an opportunity to bind its readers to it more closely, presumably increasing engagement and traffic.

Site founder Arianna Huffington explained the thought behind the innovation on the site today:
The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It's no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news... And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now -- expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.