Introduction to the NewsCloud application for Facebook

NewsCloud is an open-source Facebook application that brings the power of community to news organizations. It is powered in part by technology funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

NewsCloud:

• Enables journalists to post text articles and binary content for anyone on Facebook to see and respond to.
• Fosters interaction with the audience on Facebook by enabling users to share links and make comments.
• Can serve as a primary platform for news dissemination or be a supplemental presence, with links from the Facebook application to a news organization's primary Web site.
• Works within Facebook's advertising environment, creating a revenue stream unavailable on the open World Wide Web.

NewsCloud's Facebook application has been used in a variety of settings: academic research involving the environmental news service Grist (Hot Dish) and the University of Minnesota collegiate news service (The Daily), in classroom journalism projects at the University of Washington (in:site) and in nonprofit outreach at Genome Alberta (Genomics).

Among the other features of NewsCloud:

• Front-page news display.
• Tools for team-building and the award of points as incentive for activity. 
• Discussion forums.
• A page for resource links.
• Facebook Invitations.
• Send a gift.
• Push notifications via Facebook, e-mail, and cell-phone text messages.
• Integration of Facebook mini-feeds, and publisher and profile boxes.
• Facebook advertising.
• RSS.
• Automated Twitter publishing
• Statistics and membership analysis.
• Lending library for sharing physical things in local communities.
• Crowdsourced idea pages.
• Crowdsourced knowledge base Q&A

Currently, the application runs on PHP and MySQL, and the codebase is open-source. You can download the code for the current release of NewsCloud at github. Developers can get support and participate in our open source community here.

For those not technically inclined, NewsCloud offers consulting and hosting services at affordable rates. Design customization is available through our partner Eye Level.

You may also be interested in following the NewsCloud company blog or reading about our recent social media research funded by the Knight Foundation.

You can contact us at jeff@newscloud.com or ask a question.