WSJ Taps Facebook Friends to Drive Pageviews

The AP is reporting that the Wall Street Journal will add the ability to see what stories your friends like within the WSJ.com site. The new feature will be available later today. The newspaper Web site already has functions like "most popular" and "most emailed" and this will be a new option available to site visitors.

The technology is provided by Loomia who also has signed on CNET to the program. This is considered a widget and continues to cement my belief that 2008 is the year of the widget.

The WSJ wants to get in on the social traffic that sites like Facebook and Digg can drive. They lost the chance to capitalize on the traffic influx when blogs like TechCrunch and Engadget were getting dugg daily driving massive traffic and even-more-important inbound links. Here’s why this is more fluff than stuff:

• how many Facebook’rs have enough friends to make this valuable?
• how many Facebook’rs have enough friends who also read the WSJ site to make this
• it’s opt-in, who will bother installing it?

The WSJ should be focused on pushing out instead of keeping in — this strategy would help them increase their inbound traffic instead of trying to get a possible 2nd view from a current visitor. With a strong widget strategy, this is easily possible.