Facebook introduces social Recommendations Bar

Facebook officially launched its social Recommendations Bar, helping users stay up-to-date with the news sites their friends recommend.

Facebook officially launched its social Recommendations Bar, helping users stay up-to-date with the news sites their friends recommend.

The plug-in has been likened to social news sharing site Digg, only more focused on pages friends like and share.

"As a person reads an article, a small pop-up surfaces at the bottom of the screen highlighting recommended articles and prompting them to like the page. Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared," explains Facebook engineer Jeffrey Spehar. "Just as how the Like button works now, when a person likes an article using the Recommendations Bar, a story is published back to their timeline and friends' news feed."

Websites including Mashable, Wetpaint, and The Mirror are among the first to integrate Facebook's Recommendations Bar on their sites.

Facebook said the recommendations bar has already started generating three times the click-through rate in early tests compared to click-through rates on articles and web pages suggested in the more static Recommendations Box.