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Facebook posts coming to the wider Web

Facebook is allowing other websites to start embedding its posts on their sites
Facebook users will be able to "like" embedded posts on other websites

Facebook users will be able to "like" embedded posts on other websites

Get ready for a whole lot more Facebook content to start appearing around the Web. The social network kicked off a new program Wednesday that lets websites embed public Facebook posts on their own Web pages.

It's limited to a handful of news sites to begin with -- CNN, The Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, People and Mashable -- but soon any website will be able to embed Facebook posts on their sites, Facebook said.

If Serena Williams announced on her Facebook page that she was retiring from tennis, for example, CNN could embed the post in a news story on its site. The posts can include pictures, video, hashtags and other content.

The move is likely to make Facebook even more visible around the Web and could also increase people's engagement with the site. Clicking a hashtag on an embedded post will take people to related content on Facebook.

Only public posts can be embedded. If a user decides later to delete a post or make it private, a message will appear on the site that embedded the post saying it's no longer public.

"Embedding posts will let people using your web site see the same rich information that is shown on Facebook.com, and they will enable people to follow or like content authors or Pages directly from the embed," Facebook said in a post to developers.

Embedding posts should be relatively easy. Hovering over the audience selector on a post (the globe icon) shows whether it's public. If it is, an "embed post" option appears in a drop-down menu. A dialogue appears with a line of code to embed in the website.

Facebook said it will give other sites the ability to embed its posts "soon," though it wasn't more specific. Other social networks, like Twitter and Facebook's Instagram service, already allow their content to be embedded on other sites.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com