FacebookPlug-in
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Facebook's new Recommendations Bar pops up, just wants to be liked
Facebook's Recommendations Box sits passively on many websites, allowing us to engage or ignore as we see fit. But too much of the latter option has led to something slightly different: the new Recommendations Bar -- a pop-up variant which, when integrated by your favorite page, plugs site-specific links based on your friends' thumbs and shares. The Bar is similar to the in-house recommendation pop-ups we're all familiar with, but adds a like button for posting the current page to your timeline. It shouts much louder than the Box, so it's no surprise that in early tests the new plug-in produced a three-fold increase in click-throughs. In this case, privacy wasn't an afterthought -- Bar integration, like the Box, is at the site's discretion and sharing pages is very much on your terms. Just try not to accidently hit that like button during your daily scan of Bieber's homepage.
Google Circles knockoff hits Facebook courtesy of unofficial plug-in
Have a bad case of Google+ envy? Here's a little something that should help hold you over until the site fully opens its flood gates. Circle Hack is a self-described "one-night experiment with Javascript" created by a few Facebook engineers in a non-affiliated capacity, which unofficially brings Google Circles-like functionality to the top social network. The creators of the Facebook plug-in have borrowed liberally from Google on this one (turnabout is fair play, perhaps). Once you log in with your Facebook account, you can drag and drop rectangles of your friends from that site into circles at the bottom of your page -- a quick method for curating your Facebook lists. Given the short development of the plug-in, the functionality of the site is, not surprisingly, a bit limited. Certain things like, say, deleting circles, are absent at present -- perhaps its creators are too busy working on the Facebook Hangouts hack.
