Online news players big and small are tripping over themselves to build Facebook applications.

From Online Journalism Review:

Further empowering its users to grow its application ecosystem, Facebook recently announced the launch of the $10 million fbFund. Backed by outside investors, fbFund will grant $25,000 to $250,000 to selected individuals or start-ups building applications for the Facebook platform.

A number of news organizations have already created Facebook applications to distribute their news content. The New York Times' News Quiz application, which measures your daily news knowledge against your friends', is installed on over 6,000 users' pages and generates about 17,000 page views a week, according to NYTimes.com's Senior Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller.

"This particular news quiz is part of a larger strategy to distribute content as widely as possible. There are different ways to engender loyalty and increase page views on the Web. It's increasingly important to distribute content in parts and pieces, widgets and RSS feeds – wherever people want to consume it," said Schiller.

Indie start-ups are getting into the game, too. An app called "News Headlines," authored by UK start-up RSS2Facebook, pulls in the RSS feeds of hundreds of global news providers and displays them in a single box. From there, news stories can be bookmarked or shared with friends.

RSS2Facebook specializes in adapting the programming behind "News Headlines" for organizations which want to convert their existing RSS feeds into Facebook applications – a quick and dirty way to leverage Facebook's immense social reach.

OJR chatted with RSS2Facebook founder (and Southampton University student) Adam Cooke via MSN Messenger to learn more.

Read on to see the q-and-a.