Facebook had shown signs of pushing in the feature of unfiltered News Feed. Now this new feature is out for everyone and it has been named ‘Ticker’. The name given to the feature may sound a bit weird, but as per its working, its an accurately chosen name. Ticker basically is like a second News Feed which is small and is placed on the right hand side of the main News Feed section.
Facebook might be of the view that the users have so many happenings to check out that they might miss out on quite a few updates which might be either important or notable at least. The reason behind adding Ticker is to provide a real-time streaming which is concurrent to the main News Feed. The real-time streaming would help users notice the recently made comments, Likes, status updates and so on. It would even show the newly added photos which a user’s friend has added.
Ticker’s addition would mean that the ‘Most Recent’ option in the News Feed would be replaced. This would kill the difference between Top News and Most Recent as Ticker has no provision for it. The main News Feed would instead would have top stories. The idea of ‘Top Stories’ would still have their basis on an algorithm which would consider a user’s stalking frequency, comments, likes and so on.
With the changes made, one can notice in the screenshot that ‘News Feed’ as for name has found a replacement too. Its now labeled Recent Stories. This new feature is interesting and simple as when one clicks on an update in Ticker, the update appears in Recent Stories, placed in the middle of the page. This would help users to post comments and like the posts. Another added option is “This is a highlight”. This option helps in sticking a specific update or status to one’s News Feed. However, it wasn’t clear as to how would it would for the rest of the site.
Getting hold of Ticker may be a hassle for many as it seems to be doing to much for its space. Even though the classification is good, it fails to prove a solution which can be a permanent solution for those who fail to get all the updates for the happenings accurately.
A Facebook spokesperson however said that the test is being done as for now on News Feed which would give the users an option to know what their friends are liking and what are they commenting on Facebook activities. Like many other updates, the spokesperson said that the test is on a small percentage, which would still mean that the test is on a decent number as a fraction percent of Facebook’s 750 million+ users could count for many. The update however would have its criticisms and positives which the Facebook team would look into and make the changes accordingly as it was said by the Facebook spokesperson. He had concluded saying that in the weeks to come, they would look in for the test and if there are any improvements which can be done, then they would work on it, after which the feature would be available for many other users too.