Facebook Tweaks Article Recommendations

Facebook today (July 26) said it turned its recommendation boxes into "bars" and a handful of sites are testing it with big results. Instead of seeing three more stories that your  Facebook friends  have read in a stationary box on a website, a similar box slides up from the bottom of your screen. If your friends haven't read any articles on the site, you'll see recommendations based on the story you're reading, along with a tally of "likes." Facebook  said test sites are reporting three times the clicks as the previous format. And no wonder — pages are so crowded these days, it can be hard to distinguish between articles and ads. The slide-in recommendation bar is just enough to get your attention without disrupting your reading experience and includes Facebook's "like" button. When you first land on a page, you'll see nothing more than a small bar with "like" and "expand" icons. As you near the end of an article, the box will slide open to reveal recommendations. For those of you with a Wordpress blog or a site of your own, the recommendations bar is available as a plugin or by adding "a few lines of code," Facebook said in its  developer blog.

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