Facebook highlights ‘trending articles’ inside the News Feed

In an effort to drive traffic to Open Graph-enabled news sites like The Washington Post, Yahoo, and Huffington Post, Facebook has begun rolling out Trending Articles boxes inside the News Feed. The boxes inhabit their own space underneath a Trending Articles gray bar, and include images from articles as well as the first 130 characters of each one, Inside Facebook observed. Only articles that have been read by friends logged into Open Graph-enabled websites show up inside the boxes. Until now, Facebook has only indicated that certain topics are trending by aggregating posts from your friends that mention specific Facebook pages like “Jeremy Lin” or “Coachella.“ We haven’t been able to reproduce the box ourselves, but they’re evidence that Facebook is yet again messing with News Feed chemistry to find an equilibrium between showing updates from users, and showing updates based on the actions of users (like listening to music, playing Words With Friends, or reading an article).