As expected, Facebook is pushing forward with its unfiltered News Feed feature, which now apparently has a name: Ticker. So what exactly is the Ticker? As you can see in the screenshot above, courtesy of my colleague Zack Whittaker, it’s essentially a smaller, second News Feed to the right of the main one in the middle.
That’s right; Facebook thinks you are missing out on too many happenings across your social network. The company’s solution is to add a real-time stream concurrently with the main News Feed. The Ticker is supposed to show you all the new status updates, Likes, comments, photos, and so on that your Facebook friends are making, as they’re making them.
The Ticker is meant to replace the Most Recent option on the current News Feed. In this new design, there is no option to choose between Top News and Most Recent. Instead, the main News Feed contains the top stories (still based on an algorithm that takes into account the number of likes, comments, how often you stalk your friends, and so on) while the Ticker contains the most recent stories (everything!). In fact, it’s worth noting that while it’s still called a News Feed on the left-hand side of the website, at the top of the page it’s now just labeled Recent Stories.
If you click on a story you see going by in the Ticker, it then appears in Recent Stories on the middle of the page. From there, you can comment on it. There’s also a new “This is a highlight” option, which temporarily sticks that status or update to your News Feed. As Zack notes, it’s not yet clear how this will work with the rest of the site.
It may just be me, but the Ticker seems like a little bit too much. I definitely miss a lot of what happens on Facebook, but I’m not sure two news feeds is the solution here.
“We are currently testing a feature within News Feed that gives people the ability to see what their friends are commenting on and ‘liking’, as these actions are being taken on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “This test includes a small percentage of Facebook users, just a fraction of a percent. In the coming weeks, as we learn more from this test, we’ll keep making improvements and may expand it to more people.”
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