I’ve seen a lot of people reach my page using searches about the Facebook Ticker. Many of whom are unable to see the ticker on their account. The ticker appears to be missing from certain accounts, while it annoys other people’s accounts. I personally don’t mind it. Here’s the official word from Facebook’s Help area….
“Ticker only appears when your network of friends and connections meets a certain threshold of activity.Ticker will appear as you connect to more friends, subscriptions, and pages.”
What does this mean? Well, say you only have 50 friends on Facebook (like my husband who is constantly purging his account, even deleting all of my siblings, because they don’t interact much on Facebook). If those 50 friends don’t do a whole lot on Facebook, as in they aren’t “liking” pages or statuses, or even commenting on statuses and things like that, then Facebook has decided that you don’t really NEED the ticker, as there will barely be any activity to display in the ticker.
The ticker is to see these interactions in real time so it doesn’t cloud up the news feed. Prior to the ticker, in your news feed you’d see, “so and so likes Technology for Moms”, or “so and so is now friends with Sarah”. This would make actual status updates get buried for people who had a lot of friends that interact on Facebook. Now that data moves fast and does so over on the ticker. For people that have a lot of friends this is very helpful, as it can be ignored over there on the sidebar, or you can hide it.
To hide the ticker when it’s in your chat sidebar, you have to hide the entire chat sidebar. To do this, you simply click on the icon located at the bottom right of the chat sidebar that says “Hide Sidebar”. To get it back, you just click on the bar at the bottom that says “chat” (almost in the exact same spot as where you initially clicked to hide it.
What happens now is that the ticker will move to your homepage. When you click on the “Facebook” button on the top left of the screen it brings you back to your homepage. This will have your newsfeed, and of course your ticker if you have hidden the chat sidebar. If you do like I do though, and have separated your friends status updates from the pages you follow, and just use those lists (refer to how to separate your newsfeed here) You won’t ever see the ticker, as you are no longer using the homepage as your source for status updates (unless of course the Chat Sidebar is open)
If you don’t want to see someone’s updates in the ticker, go to their profile, and put your mouse over the “subscribed” link at the top right of the page. From here you can select exactly what you want to see from the person. You can unsubscribe from everything (which will NOT unfriend the person), or you can just select to see Status Updates by unchecking everything BUT the Status Updates. Customize exactly what you want to see from people, to make the ticker less cluttered. Unfortunately, there is no way to “mass unsubscribe” from all of your friends. You have to do it individually.
So, if you are missing the Facebook ticker, and you would like to have it, find more people to friend on Facebook, or make your current friends interact more. Simple as that, right?
Sarah Kimmel
