Facebook Ticker

» see facebook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

nobody chose the ticker. it arrived. one morning in september 2011 there was a narrow column down the right side of every facebook page on earth, scrolling everything your friends had just done, and the morning before there had not been.

it launched on 20 september 2011, in the same week facebook rewrote the news feed and announced timeline. the news feed had by then become a ranked thing, an algorithm deciding which of your friends deserved space. the ticker was the raw stream underneath it. not just status updates but likes, comments, songs listened to, articles read, everything in the order it happened.

people named it the creeper feed inside about a week and the name stuck for six years. the complaint was never really about privacy settings, which had not changed. it was that facebook had taken activity everyone already generated and given it a stage. liking a photo had been a private-feeling gesture between you and one person. the ticker turned it into a line item scrolling past several hundred people at once, timestamped.

turkey was one of facebook's larger markets by 2011 and the ticker landed here on the same day it landed everywhere else, because that is what a feature with no opt-in does. i could not tell you when it left. neither could the reporters who eventually wrote the thing up, which is why the december 2017 stories all read like someone checking a pulse.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

badly, and then not at all. the september 2011 backlash was loud enough that facebook was reported in march 2013 to be considering dropping the ticker in a redesign. it kept it. what actually finished it was not the criticism but the phone. the ticker was a right-hand rail, and a right-hand rail is a desktop object. by the middle of the decade most facebook sessions had no right side of the screen to put anything on, so the feature existed only for a shrinking group of people sitting at computers.

that is a quieter death than being hated. the ticker was designed for a moment when facebook was still a website you visited in a browser window wide enough to have wasted space in it. once the product moved into a phone-shaped rectangle, the entire spatial idea it was built on stopped existing.

~ the funny part ~

in december 2017 facebook removed the ticker without announcing it, and confirmed it only in a help community thread after users started asking where their sidebar had gone. techcrunch and engadget both wrote it up as an obituary for something they had to go and check was actually dead.

in the same december, facebook gave the poke button a much more prominent spot on profiles and added a set of quick gestures around it called greetings, a hug and a high-five among them. so the month it deleted its real-time surveillance strip it also tried to bring back the 2004 novelty button. the ticker was the feature nobody wanted and everybody saw, and the poke was the feature nobody understood and everybody remembers. facebook killed the first one and went looking for the second.

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