Google News has created a Facebook application allowing users to search and share stories. Users are able to create their own news categories, as well as selecting from predefined news topics, and mail news to Facebook chums.

According to Google the application is still experimental – just in the beta phase claims the Google News blog – but so far, not so good.

It seems you have to navigate to a separate page to get all your news from Google, in addition to this annoyance (which I think will be sufficient to put a lot of people off) you can’t do anything about the Top and Most Popular stories column on the right side of the page. You can’t crush them down or remove them, the only option is to ‘read more’ which low-and-behold, opens another tab in your browser to show the Google News page.

The Google News app in its current state seems to be a way to navigate out of Facebook quickly (never really a bad thing I suppose). A wish list has been set up on the apps page so that people can recommend alterations – expect changes quickly.

I have another Google News app that I use, it’s called Goonews and was developed by a guy called Eran Shir and powered by Dapper (not sure what ‘powered’ actually means in this context). It’s a bit more rudimentary (you have to define your search term ahead of time and seem to only ever to be able to have one category of news displayed) but at least its as flexible the other apps on my profile page – at least its on my profile page.