Facebook’s 6-year-old ticker feature has been removed by the social networking giant, resulting in a number of complaints from their users.
If you’re a regular user of Facebook on your PC or laptop rather than your smartphone, you may have realised that the Facebook ticker is no longer present.
The ticker was the real-time feed of updates that appeared above the list of contacts on the top right hand side of your screen. However, over the last few weeks, Facebook users have been complaining that the feature appeared to have been removed.
And on a support thread, a member of the Facebook team finally confirmed that the feature is no longer available.
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When the ticker was first launched, it was quite a controversial feature, deemed creepy by many Facebook users. That’s because it provided a real-time, instant feed on anything your friends did on Facebook (as long as it was activity that wasn’t hidden by privacy settings.) That could mean when your friends commented on a post or became friends with another person, the Facebook ticker would publish it.
However, as Facebook increasingly filters their user’s newsfeeds and increased the frequency of “sponsored stories” (i.e. adverts,) many Facebook users turned to the Facebook ticker for an uninterrupted and chronological feed of recent stories, most of which wouldn’t appear on their actual newsfeeds.
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The move means Facebook has a lot more control over what you see on their website, and your experience is now relying almost solely on what their algorithms deem worthy [and unworthy] of your attention. Yes, you can temporarily switch your Facebook newsfeed to “most recent” but our own tests show this doesn’t work too well, as it still misses out lots of stories, and you have to switch to that setting each time you load your newsfeed.
What do you think of the Facebook ticker. Did you use it? Do you think it was right for Facebook to remove it?