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This is a repost of an article that originally appeared at Inside Facebook

Facebook is testing out a new way of highlighting comments for items in users Top Stories news feed, according to an interface tweak spotted yesterday by Ryan Spoon of Polaris Ventures. Here’s how the new story type appears to work.

First, a mutual friend shares a link on Facebook. This generates an initial news feed story — note that shared links typically appear in the unfiltered “Most Recent” news feed, but not the algorithmically sorted “Top Stories” feed. However, when at least two mutual friends comment on this shared link, a second style of story is generated in “Top Stories.” It shows you the names of the two commenters on the post, including links to those users’ profiles. This second feed story also hides the original message that the friend who shared the link provided, although clicking on the word “link” will take you to it.

Otherwise, the two versions of the story are the same: the second feed story also will show you all the likes and comments on the original item. Here’s the screenshot of the new version:

The new interface tweak appears to be in limited testing, but is somewhat reminiscent of Facebook’s old “feed templates.” Also, we don’t know if this type of comment-driven “Top Stories” item is happening for other types of information that appears in news feeds, like event RSVPs, newly-added pages and friends, etc.

Here’s the original shared link story:

The overall reason for the change is clear, in any case. Facebook wants to make information that your friends share more prominent when your other friends find it interesting. Right now, most users appear to favor the “Top Stories” view, which means they could easily miss shared links. With this change, when your friends comment on a link, Facebook assumes that you’ll find it more meaningful, too. Assuming this is the case, the new story format will help make Top Stories more valuable to users, and to web publishers who want Facebook users sharing their links.

Ultimately, this helps make Facebook itself more useful to people, and so increases engagement and possibly other factors, like friend invites and time on site.

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2. Inside Facebook: Facebook Tests Full Text Comment Stories in the Recent Activity Feed
3. Inside Facebook: Now Showing: Rich News Feed Stories for Likes of Facebook Pages
4. Inside Facebook: Now Showing: Threaded Comments for Multiple Posts of the Same Link from Different Facebook Friends
5. All Facebook: Facebook Upgrades Shared Links Feed Stories

Tags: business, development, newsfeed, stream