We’re excited to announce today the beta launch of a new social layer we call Mashable Follow. This project is the start of a significant shift for Mashable in 2011, as we evolve from being a purely editor-driven news site to becoming a true news community that seeks to engage our readers in the news process.

Beyond personalization, we believe that curation is the next great wave in news, and empowering our community to choose the news of the day is the ultimate aim of the Follow project.

The Engagement Era

If you’re a Mashable reader, chances are you’re already among the most engaged news consumers on the web:

• Social influence service Klout named Mashable the Most Influential Media Outlet, while a Hewlett-Packard study ranked @mashable the most influential Twitter account, based on retweeted links.
• Thanks to our 3,400,000+ strong community across social platforms, Mashable articles are retweeted more than 40,000 times per day and shared on Facebook more than 40,000 times per week.
• It’s largely due to you, our exceptionally passionate readers, that we’ve been able to grow beyond 12 million unique visitors per month and become the world’s largest independent web technology news site.

Which led us to the question: How do we make Mashable more social, more useful and more personalized to you? Better still, how can we let our readers choose the news they want to read — and one day curate the news for their own networks of influence?

That was the starting point for Mashable Follow, which enters beta testing today.

Mashable Follow: A Better Mashable Experience

What is Mashable Follow? Well, Mashable had an extremely successful 2010, growing from 15 staff members to 40 and increasing our output to more than 45 stories per day. We also launched new channels like Business & Marketing, Dev & Design and Startups.

The downside of all this new content: More content for readers to sift through! So, how about we let readers log in to Mashable and follow only the topics that interest them?

That’s what the first incarnation of Mashable Follow is all about:

• Easy log-in: Log in to Mashable with your Twitter or Facebook account – no need to create a new one!
• Follow topics: The new “Follow” buttons on every story let you subscribe to those topics via your “My Stories” feed (and coming soon, e-mail!). Whenever we publish a story matching your topics, you’ll be notified.
• Simple sharing: Given that the Mashable community loves to share, we wanted to make sharing our stories even easier – so we did! Mashable Follow allows readers to add their Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and Digg accounts (and more coming soon!) to their profile pages and share to all of these services in a single click.
• Profile pages: Mashable Follow also lets you create a profile page on Mashable, promote all your social media accounts, and connect with other Mashable community members who share your interests.
• Badges: For a bit of fun, Mashable members can now earn badges for sharing stories, connecting with other Mashable users, commenting on articles, following topics and more. Over time, we hope to create more substantial rewards for our most engaged readers, awarding more influence to our most dedicated community members and allowing them to set the news agenda.

Just the Start

Of course, these new features are just the starting point for Mashable‘s social ambitions, and we have grand plans to make Mashable much more than just a digital news source: We want our community to power the news.

With your help, feedback and contributions, we can’t wait to make that happen!

To get on the invite list for Mashable Follow, please visit mashable.com/follow. We’re adding new people as quickly as we can.