Not something that bothers me, but this is something I’ve been wondering about for a while.
On the right hand side of the Facebook screen I have the column that shows my friends, who’s logged in and allows me to chat with them. This is all I have in that strip. My wife and everybody I know has another area above the chat strip that show them their friends’ activity. So-and-so has like a status update - that sort of thing.
Whenever I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t have that information, all I get is people telling me that they wish they didn’t have it either. And frankly, I don’t care one way or the other. But I am curious as to WHY I don’t have it. Did I somehow manage to opt out and forget what I did? Do I not qualify in some way. I thought I might have been passed by on an update, but I recently got the new Facebook look and that upgrade has also left me out on the window in question.
I don’t get that extra strip either. I’ve never looked into it (because I don’t care), but pretty sure I read somewhere that it relates to how active your are.
Facebook does a lot of A/B testing where they roll out different features to different groups of users.
If you round up 20 random people and look carefully at their FB homepages, you might notice little differences: this person’s profile link might be in the upper left, this person’s might be in the upper right; this person’s posts might say “Stop notifications”, this other person’s might say “Unfollow post”. Occasionally there are more drastic changes too, like the whole Wall vs Timeline change. Some of these experiments they’ll announce and let you opt in or out of. Others they’ll just randomly perform and never tell you about. It’s really annoying, actually. It might have something to do with how much you use Facebook, or it might be completely random… I seem a lot of these random changes and my friends never do when I ask them about it or look at their home pages.
It’s called the ‘ticker’ and here it describes how to get it back. It seems really stupid to have to have to do it that way, but I did it and it worked for me.
Note what the help file suggests - “…You also might not be connected to people or Pages that use Facebook a lot…”. Judging from that it’s not how active you are, it’s how active whatever you connect to is.
On the other hand, now the OP has been answered, you might prefer to remove a large part of the crud Facebook pushes at you. Fluff Busting Purity is a plug-in that makes FB actually usable. Sadly only for desktop browsers, and not smart phones. But once you install it, you won’t go back.
I’m connected to the same people on my iPad and desktop, though.
I have other Facebook accounts that I’m rarely on. I should get on and see if they have it. And from the OP, if I understand correctly, he is talking about the updates from people you follow or are friends with, and not the trending headlines, right?
It also doesn’t show if your resolution is low enough, as it’s not considered essential. The iPad appears to have a 1024 pixel resolution, and I’ve never seen the ticker on anything less than 1200.
The whole point of it was to demote items that you might not want to see to an easily ignorable second feed. There are, believe it or not, some people who freak out about how Facebook doesn’t show you every single thing your friends post.
I believe it originally was for those annoying app posts, but I still some of those in my feed, so maybe not.