Facebook Launches a Recommendations Bar to Keep Users Reading on Sites

Building off the now-common Like button that it launched last year, Facebook is introducing a new social plugin today called the Recommendations Bar. It’s designed to deliver additional recommended articles to readers right as they finish each article.

While Facebook’s recommendations box plugin has already driven this behavior, there has not been a slick interface to help readers move to a new recommended story once they finish the first recommended one. In most implementations to date, the user has to click back to find more stories in the recommendations box.

The new plugin lives at the lower right corner of each browser window of a page that has the plugin installed. It floats down as users scroll, basically like how other toolbars work. When a user first loads a page — say, an article on CNN — the bar is collapsed and only shows the option to Like the page. But as the user spends more time reading the article and scrolling down, the plugin will expand and show additional articles to read on the site based on the criteria below.

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