The Facebook homepage will now no longer feature the Ticker news feed that displays recent activity from a user’s friends and contacts. Users were the first to notice and point out that the Ticker had disappeared from their homepage. Then, a company representative confirmed the news through a help community article.
A Brief History of the Ticker News Feed
The Ticker news feed first launched back in 2011 and was regularly displayed in the upper-right corner of the site’s homepage. It was situated there for all users accessing the website on either desktop or laptop computer. The feature was not available in the mobile browsers or smartphone apps.
This Ticker was seen as an alternative news feed for heavy users of the website. It was meant to help them track new posts and activity updates in real-time. This differed from the site’s main news feed. More commonly used, this takes up the central real estate of the desktop website and displays stories and advertisements based on the company’s sorting algorithm.
Since Facebook releases new features and site updates on a rolling basis, some users did not realize until recently that the Ticker had been removed from the site. According to the help community article, the feature has now been removed for all users, though individuals can submit feedback on the decision.
In place of the Ticker feed, the website is instead promoting its new Stories feature. It is similar to features on Instagram and Snapchat that allow users to build video and photo collections. These are viewable to friends for a limited time before automatically disappearing.
The decision to remove the Ticker feed surprised and frustrated some users. However, many opposed the feature when it was first launched. These claimed that this encouraged users to closely monitor the activity of other people on the site. Similar functionalities remain in place, as the site’s main news feed can be sorted based on the most recent activity.
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