News Networking

Soon you will see features of social networking integrated into some of your news sites. News sites will start to use social networking as a way to increase reader participation on their sites.
News sites are already using blogs so readers can discuss issues in the news. I know because my husband does this every day. He finds the hot topics on the local newspaper's Web site and blogs about them, sometimes for hours. Next the news sites will let people like him create profiles with internal email so they can send each other personal messages, the kind that aren't appropriate to post on the boards probably.
Do you think social networking will be beneficial to news sites? Will people use these board constructively or just for flaming?
~admin