New Facebook Ticker is the Old-Old Facebook

If you preferred Facebook as it used to be, don't complain about the ticker.
Facebook ticker

Facebook is changing (forever changing, it seems), and one of the new features is the ticker, a near real-time stream of all the activity happening on Facebook. Unlike the main feed, the page you see when you log on to that lets you customize the information that comes through, the ticker is a near real-time feed of all the activity happening among your Facebook friends, unfiltered.

The information that comes through the ticker is not different information from what's in your feed. Rather, it's all the information that could be shown in your feed, if you didn't have quite so many friends doing quite so many things.

In other words, it's almost exactly what the feed page used to be, before Facebook's latest redesign, and before Facebook added any filters and controls, such as the ability to hide posts from specific people (no more Farmville updates from Aunt Lupita). Just think of it as the old-old Facebook, now in its own tiny scrolling box.

One other minor difference between the ticker and the current Facebook feed is that your own posts and activity don't appear in the ticker.

The ticker not only resembles the old-old Facebook, it's also a whole lot like Twitter—immediate and scrollable updates for everyone you're "following"—except that Facebook doesn't have any search capabilities in its module, nor a 140-character limit. In other ways, it's similar to Google+ in that when you click an item, a larger view of it appears at left that lets you interact with the message quickly, without navigating to a full screen page of the thread, or to the person's wall.

Ticker is rolling out to all Facebook users now. If you can't see the Facebook ticker on your Facebook account just yet, take a spin through our slideshow, which compares the ticker to other platforms and media.

For more, see Everything You Need to Know About the New Facebook and Will Facebook's Ticker Turn Into Song Spam?



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