Nielsen recently released a report stating that time spent on Social Networking sites in the US a tripled in August from the same month last year.

This is hardly a surprise. We are social beings. We are optimized to look for, recognize and gravitate towards faces. We like to tell each other stories and view the world through the lens of like minded individuals.

Social Networking sites have captured our imaginations by observing and capitalizing on these trends.

How can news sites, applications and other web properties that are not traditionally thought of as social networks compete in such a marketplace?

The answer is not to create your own social network. There are already plenty of those out there. You don’t need your own login, and you certainly don’t want to outsource your social user experience to yet another social networking destination site.

The answer is to make your site a first class extension of the existing social networking destination sites. You want users of major social networks to be able to swarm to your site, have a great experience with their friends and other users, and leave just as easily. You want them to feel that visiting your site is just another click along their social journey – not yet another place where they need to create a profile and claim stuff.

You need to borrow and steal all the best lessons that the social networks teach us. Faces should be attached to everything. Friends are the filter. Login is one click. Sharing is caring. Social gestures are just as important as comments and content – even more so. Real-time makes things fun and dynamic.

These are the things we have focused on when building and refining Echo. We think of Echo as a pipe that helps users bridge from the social networks to your site. To help them interact with their friends using the profiles and metaphors they already understand. To help them share with their friends and to help them come back at any time.

The result, one of our customers reports (Building43.com) is an average of a 3x increase in time spent.

We will continue to learn from the best Social Networking features and bring those experiences to your site through Echo.

Echo is not a commenting service and it is most certainly not a funnel to a new social networking destination site. It is a realtime lifestream for your content that encourages and surfaces engagement with your content from across the web. It lives on your page and enables social networking users to visit and bring their friends.

(via GigaOm)