While browsing my Facebook feed, I noticed that a new box appeared at the top labeled Trending Articles with a grey background separating it from the rest of the stories. The best guess is that the most read stories among your friends may show up as a trending article in that box.
At the time, the two articles being shown were actually the most recently read by my Facebook friends. It even shows you who read the stories just underneath the 130 character story excerpt.
The unit’s placement definitely feels intrusive because the box itself was like any other story which popped up and then slowly went down the feed as newer posts appeared. What’s worse is that I was not able to hide the box or any of the stories within the box.
This is yet another step in Facebook’s plan to get users to jump over to the ‘seamless’ Open Graph service that integrates news articles, music, and other apps into one via the homepage feed and ticker.
Like many other features that are tested on such a large scale, they eventually go live 99% of the time. Just last week, they started testing a feature that clearly identified which stories were Social Reader stories versus regular links being intentionally shared by users.
Sadly enough, if such a feature like this does go live, it could be the deal breaker for many (including myself) because Open Graph requires you to sign in via an application. If not configured correctly, it also means that users can see exactly what articles you browse. Sometimes a user might forget that Open Graph is enabled on a website and view articles that they might consider sensitive, only to find out a mini-history is being posted via their Facebook profile.
Tech And Wealth 