Google News Starts Testing A Social Layer: Twitter

There's a lot of speculation about Google's upcoming stab at social (take 15, or so, for those keeping track at home). The most recent talk has Google adding a social layer to all of their properties to tie them all together. One such property is actually already trying out such a layer -- but it's a social layer run by Twitter. As Search Engine Land points out , Google News is currently in the process of testing out a new Twitter integration that allows you to have a new "Friends" column which is populated with stories your friends tweet out. To enable this, you simply enter your Twitter username into a box, and Google will go out and crawl your (public) Twitter friends to see what links they're sharing.