Facebook to add ‘tickers’ to users homepages

True to their policy of making people more socially aware, Facebook is launching a floating box called a ‘Ticker’. Want to know more about it? 

According to Facebook’s Help Centre, the ‘ticker’ will allow users to monitor their friends’ activities as they happen. If you have the chat pane disabled, the ticker will look something like this and will float on the screen—it will move down as you scroll down.

Click to see the full-sized image.

If you have the chat pane enabled, which is surprising, the new ‘ticker’ will be appear inside it. In both cases, the ‘ticker’ will update in real-time— as soon as one of your friends likes a page or adds somebody as a friend, whatever, you will see that in your ticker. And if you want to leave a comment on your friend’s latest activity, all you have to do is click on that item in the ticker, and a box, which will let you comment, will appear. Apologies for not adding the image, but, for some odd reason, the ‘ticker’ is no longer there.

In my opinion, the ‘ticker’ will annoy users more than it will help them. It is something that will constantly distract users and the kind of updates the ‘ticker’ will carry, do not cater to many people. I am not a huge fan of gossiping so I would not like to be updated in real time about what my friends are up to. Additionally, isn’t the default News Feed doing the job already? Also, I think that this is only one of the many updates that Facebook intends to roll out in the near future. Have a look at the following image posted by the folks at ZDNet.

Click to see the full-sized image.

What do you think about Facebook’s idea of updating the homepage? Do you think that it will spoil the exprience? Is there anything else that you’d like to tell us? Answer these questions by leaving a comment below.