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A number of recent studies have shown that social media services like Twitter and Facebook are one of the largest sources of traffic for news sites, and the BBC has now decided to aggressively test the limits of this dynamic by launching the BBC News Control Panel on Facebook.

The Control Panel requires that you first "like" the BBC page on Facebook, after which you are presented with a menu of options that allow you to customize your Facebook news feed by topic, news show, or correspondent.

Explaining the reasoning behind the move, BBC News product manager Gareth Owen said, "Fewer than 50 percent of the 8 million-plus visitors to the News website every day see our front page and the rest arrive directly at a story, video page or section index Almost a quarter of a million individual users start their BBC News website journey via a link on Facebook every day."

Apparently not everyone is a fan. Not long after the BBC announced the new Facebook feature, several BBC fans voiced some rather strong opposition to the feature.

A BBC user named Chris offered the most detailed critique saying, "Sorry, but while I appreciate that many people come in from Twitter or Facebook, and while I think it is reasonable for the BBC to add sharing buttons and the like, I strongly dislike the idea of the BBC spending its resources building applications specifically to promote a proprietary, privately run platform and one moreover whose revenue comes from attempting to monetise its users personal data and activity records."

For now, the BBC says this is just a beta product, but the execution and ease-of-use of the feature suggests that a lot of thought went into the Control Panel.

A number of news organizations, like the Washington Post and Yahoo News, have launched Facebook-centric apps that allow users to automatically share with their friends the stories they read. Facebook says this is an easy way to keep your friends up-to-date with your interests, though critics have argued that it is ruining sharing.

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BBC Launches 'News Control Panel' on Facebook