Four US news broadcasters expand on fast-growing Facebook

By Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews

August 18, 2008, 7:03 PM

With Facebook growing at a far brisker clip than any other major social network, four big news organizations, including Fox News -- whose parent company owns rival MySpace -- are now expanding their Facebook presences.

News opportunities on Facebook could loom huge. Although about 32 percent of all Internet users belong to social networking sites, only roughly 10 percent of them regularly receive news on those sites, according to a new survey by Pew Research.

Meanwhile, Facebook has held the number one spot among social networking sites ever since overtaking MySpace in April of this year, says a new report from comScore released last week.

Over the past year, Facebook has enjoyed a 153% increase in new users, in contrast to an industry average of only 25% and an anemic rate of just three percent for MySpace.

Now, although ABC News has pulled a "U.S. Politics" application launched on Facebook last year, Disney-owned ABC is also expected to roll out a new and larger news application on Facebook over the next few weeks.

CNN and MSNBC.com -- the online portal for NBC News -- have both confirmed they are working on improving their own respective presences on Facebook.

On Tuesday, Fox -- an organization owned, like MySpace, by News Corp. -- is expected to unveil a new video player for the Facebook site that will let users watch Fox and Fox News videos, post selected clips to their own profiles, and share those clips with friends on Facebook.

Fox will also roll out a redesigned page on Facebook designed for full exploitation of Facebook features such as user reviews, polls, and discussion boards.

Why is Facebook growing so rapidly? Some observers point to increasing globalization on the site since Facebook's adoption of natural language interfaces a couple of years ago.

Moreoever, outside of Facebook's proven attractiveness to new users, Joel Cheatwood, Fox's senior VP for development, has cited some demographic differences between Facebook and MySpace, contending that Facebook pulls in a slightly older social networking crowd.