First The Wall Street Journal cozied up to Digg, now they're cozying up to Facebook. The newspaper's website has just launched a new feature in conjunction with Loomia that will allow you to easily see what stories are popular with your Facebook friends and networks - all without leaving the story you are reading.

This new 'Popular with My Facebook Friends & Networks' places a section on the right-hand sidebar of every story. You have to opt-in to the service to allow it to access your Facebook data and send information back, but once you do that you will see a list of stories populated based upon how many people you know have read them (and are also using this application).

Certainly there are other applications like this on Facebook, but this one is unique because it is not solely on Facebook and doesn't require that you go to the site at all to use it - Facebook in a sense just works as an information conduit back and forth to The Wall Street Journal.

Interestingly enough I had just written yesterday on VentureBeat about a very similar potential idea Digg could explore with their new membership in the DataPortability group. Seeing as The Wall Street Journal already has 'Digg This' button on everypage, perhaps they will also one day have a ''WSJ Stories Your Friends Dugg' sidebar section.

If you're willing to opt-in and install yet another Facebook Application, this Wall Street Journal one could be pretty useful. I expect to see a whole lot more of these social network elements on more traditional sites in the coming months - especially when OpenSocial hits.


[UPDATE]: Let's also note the connections here. Microsoft has an advertising deal with (and owns a small part of) Facebook, they also have an advertising deal with Digg, and as of yesterday they have an advertising deal with...The Wall Street Journal.

Are the digital media empires starting to form?