Should we be giddy or terrified?

I am no fan of the Huffington Post. Its journalistic ethics are questionable—see Nico Pitney prearranging a question with the White House and HuffPost’s repurposing of other sites’ intellectual property; its thirst for page views often overshadows any cultural standards—see "Ashley Greene NUDE PHOTOS: Naked Pics of Twilight Star" and "Sisters or Mother and Daughter? Hot Hollywood Moms (PHOTOS, Poll)." Its aesthetic, all capital letters and stock photography, may as well be from 1999—see the home page that Slate’s Jack Shafer immortally called “ugly like a bleeding naked mole rat painted DayGlo.” The site is anathema to what I hope to see from the future of journalism.

I’m sharing my HuffPo distaste so you know that I don’t take the following statement lightly: On Monday, Huffington Post unveiled the future of journalism.

Huffington Post has released a new feature called HuffPost Social News. It’s a partnership with Facebook that tracks what Huffington Post articles you and all of your Facebook friends are reading, commenting on, and voting on. It uses a technology called Facebook Connect, Facebook’s most unheralded weapon in the battle for ownership of everything we do online. Connect basically serves as a conduit between Facebook and another Web site, allowing data to be sent between the two. Facebook sends profile information. In return, the site sends details on what the user is doing. Web sites, of course, have always tracked what pages their users visit. Now HuffPost is broadcasting that information to all of your friends. It has become a loudmouthed Big Brother.

Once a HuffPost reader logs into Huffington Post with her Facebook account—more on how she does this in a second—the site starts tracking everything she does on any huffingtonpost.com page. The site is also tracking all of her Facebook friends who have also logged on to Huffington Post. All of this can be seen by you and your friends on a page that looks like a mashup of Huffington Post and a Facebook wall feed. This makes for an intriguingly muted kaffeeklatsch: Everybody knows what everybody’s reading, but nobody necessarily has to talk about it. A layer of news has been placed on top of the social network. Now not only can you know what your freshman-year roommate did on Friday night, you also can find out what she read right before she left the house.

It’s the personal element that makes HuffPost Social such an intriguing and promising experiment. The point of reading news is not just to keep abreast about what’s happening in the world, it’s to keep up with what your friends know is happening in the world. Reading and watching news is an inherently social process; to have a debate, you have to have a shared set of facts. (Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.)

This, of course, is what makes blogs and Twitter go  'round. Information is shared and debated. But that sharing is deliberate—somebody needs to remember to share an article they read in order for others to find out about it. HuffPost Social makes that process automated. It doesn’t matter if a friend liked a piece on health care co-ops; he clicked onto it, and now I can do the same. Later I can bring it up over a drink (or, more likely, a tweet) and either play it coy—“Did you see that thing on HuffPo?”—or straight—“I saw that you read that thing on HuffPo, what did you think?” Soon I won’t even need to ask the question. The Big Money has learned that next week every article page will tell you how many of your HuffPost Social-registered friends have also read the piece. We will be glimpsing the social history of the article at the same time we’re contributing to it.

On the business side, social news’ purpose is twofold. First, this kind of personalization of the news strengthens a reader’s connection to both their friends and the site. Much is in doubt about journalism’s future business model, but it’s safe to assume that brand identity will still be important. Killer apps like HuffPost Social are the kinds of things that sites need to make them must-reads.

Then there are the raw numbers. The more automated the process, the more links to go around. More links mean more page views. More page views mean more ad revenue. And more ad revenue means a healthier media industry. Huffington Post told The Big Money that since basic integration with Facebook in January, their referrals have grown 40 percent to 60 percent month over month, according to internal statistics. (This is where I give the boilerplate warning on Web-traffic statistics: They can always be fudged and rarely be replicated.) They figure the more integration with Facebook, the more page views from Facebook. Thus HuffPost Social.

But HuffPost Social’s biggest impact on the future of journalism won’t take place on the Huffington Post. It’ll happen on Facebook. By encouraging me to log in to Huffington Post using my Facebook profile, the site is making it even easier for me to share articles with my friends on my Facebook wall because the two products are linked, both psychologically and technologically. (For now HuffPost Social isn’t broadcasting everything a user reads onto her Facebook feed, only within her HuffPost Social feed, which can be seen only within huffingtonpost.com.) This is great for the Huffington Post, since it removes the barriers of entry to sharing links and therefore drives more page views.

But imagine what happens if other sites start to integrate so wholly with Facebook. (Already 15,000 have some type of integration, but it’s minor compared with Huffington Post’s.) Once there’s a critical mass of activity coming into Facebook from elsewhere on the Internet, the roles change—Huffington Post isn’t the first-stop news portal on the Web; Facebook is.

This may be the future of journalism, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to save it. Making Facebook the aggregator of the future has all sorts of implications about how news penetrates certain social groups. Will demographics become even more hermetic in their thinking and news-gathering than they already are? How will folks get information from outside their social group if all news becomes social? And empowering Facebook is good for now, but can it be trusted in the future? The company will take care of its own interests first and foremost; what if it changes the terms of all of these content partnerships? A Facebook-led journalistic future is fraught with just as much uncertainty as one led by the mainstream media.

Then there is the issue of privacy. HuffPost Social is an opt-in affair; you’re not part of it unless you want to be. But once you’re in, you’re really in. It’s all customizable, of course, so people can control the amount of data they’re sharing. But there’s a stunning amount of data to be sorted through. I now know, for example, what some of my friend’s friends have been reading on Huffington Post. Do I need to know this? Of course not. Yet it’s there to be seen. HuffPost Social has a stealth mode for when you want to look at something without being tracked, but that just reminds users that they are being tracked. If users are too uncomfortable having their movement tracked and shared explicitly, then this thing will never get off the ground. Big Brother is at his best when he’s invisible. Yet the whole point of this social news experiment is to share everything, to make everything as visible as possible. That tension will have to be resolved.

But just because this may fail doesn’t mean it won’t be the future of journalism. The question is how permanent of a future it will be. Users can certainly reject the new initiatives, but that won’t stop publishers from foisting them forward. This kind of syndication and social tracking is just too much of a gold mine to ignore. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not important. Trust me. Huffington Post has taught me that lesson all too well.