More on the Facebook Ticker

An awesome rundown on things you can--and cannot--do with the Facebook ticker. Hat-tip to this article: Social Media Examiner

Probably the most controversial change is the addition of the News Feed Ticker. Some people hate it; others love it. But the one thing you can’t do is easily hide it. Although there are some workarounds.

The News Feed Ticker shows all the comments, posts, likes, friendships and events of all of your friends, pages and subscriptions.

The Ticker contains posts and “activity stories” (such as friends commenting on other posts, liking pages, RSVPing to events, etc.) but now the “recent stories” area contains only posts (which can include status updates, pictures, links and videos) by friends, pages, subscriptions and stories posted by apps (such as YouTube or Networked Blogs).

The Ticker is very real-time and shows who is doing what on Facebook right now. By clicking on the down arrow in the upper-right corner of a post, you can have more control over what you see from that person or the app that posted the story.

Click the down arrow in the upper-right corner to adjust the settings for posts.

The “activity stories” are what appear in the Ticker, so if you don’t want to see every move made by a person, you can unsubscribe to their activity stories. You’ll still get updates when that person posts something in their status bar. You can also decide if you don’t want to see updates from a certain type of application as shown in the picture above.

Something interesting about the Ticker is that previous posts by pages and friends may have a longer life than they did before. When someone comments or replies to a previous post, the story of that comment shows up in the Ticker and you can then click on the story to see the whole post again as shown in the figure below.

Posts have a longer life due to follow-up comments.

One benefit of the Ticker is if you have friends who are also connected to your fan page, and you see that they’ve replied to your fan page post in the Ticker, you can reply as your page right from the Ticker. But only if you have your Posting Preferences set to “Always Comment as your Page.” Find this setting in the Edit Page area of your Facebook page, and then select “Your Settings.”

Reply as your page right from the Ticker.

Removing Farmville (and other) Updates from Your Facebook Feed

You love your Facebook friends.  You don't love their updates from Farmville and all the other games.  So how do you suppress the Facebook updates related to the games without suppressing all the other "real" updates coming from your friends?  Just hide the application.  And you can do it!

You have to get Facebook to show you a menu that isn't always obvious.  (Thanks, Facebook...now you're acting like the rest of my life.)  

• To access this menu, place your mouse near the thin gray line that borders the top of the post you want to screen out, then head to the right end of that line.
• A small down-arrow will appear in a rectangle.  Click this down-arrow.
• A submenu will appear which has several options.
• On the submenu--typically near the bottom--will be an option to Hide everything from that application.
• Presto!  Facebook will then intelligently screen out updates from that application for all your friends.

You should only need to do this once per application and Facebook will screen out updates for all your friends.  In other words, you do not have to do this for each friend.  And great news...the rest of your updates from those same friends will still appear.  Now you can learn about their farm without learning about their Farmville.  Cool, eh?