Facebook Turns Like Buttons, Comments, Auto-Sharing Into WordPress Widgets For Easy Faceblogging

Facebook continues its march across the Internet with the release of its Like button, recommendation feed, comments box and other social plugins as WordPress.org and WordPress VIP widgets. There’s also new one-click WordPress admin options like auto-sharing what users read and auto-publishing blog posts as links from Facebook Pages and author accounts.

The idea is that more blogs will integrate with Facebook now that adding social functionality is as easy as checking a box rather than writing code. Facebook hopes bonus referral traffic will lure in authors, allow it to suck more content into the news feed, and stamp its name everywhere.

TechCrunch is one of the launch partners, but we want your input on which options we should use. We already employ Facebook comments to cut out the trolls, but should we do auto-sharing of your reading habits? I’m going to take a wild guess and say most of you would hate that.

We’re going to start by testing the Recommendations Bar plugin for some users so you can get suggestions for what to read next based on what your Facebook friends are reading and what’s most popular. Those in the test will see it in the bottom right corner of article pages. Social reading is off by default but you can activate it if really want to start broadcasting your reading activity.

Let us know your thoughts in the *Facebook* comments below.

Here are the full list of new WordPress options and widgets:

Page and Post Features

All of these features are easy to enable via checkboxes on the Facebook settings page.

Post to an Author’s Facebook Timeline whenever they publish a new WordPress Post or Page.
Mention friends and Facebook Pages. This posts to their Timelines as well as lists them on the WordPress Post or Page.
Post all new WordPress Post or Pages to a specified Facebook Page.
Like, send, and subscribe buttons can be enabled in a click and are fully customizable.
Facebook Comments, including full SEO support.
Open Graph Protocol integration.
Recommendations bar, which allows users to click to start getting recommendations, Like content, and add what they’re reading to Timeline as they go.

Widgets

All of these features are easy to enable via the Widgets settings page.

Activity Feed Box. This shows the Facebook user the activity that their friends are doing on your website.
Recommendations Box. This shows the Facebook user recommendations of pages they should visit based on the actions their friends are taking on your website.
Like, send, and subscribe buttons.