Facebook has an optional sidebar panel that you can turn on that gives you an interesting perspective of what your facebook friends are up to at this very moment. The regular newsfeed shows things that your friends post. However the "ticker" panel on the sidebar shows their other real-time actions like commenting on posts and liking posts.
This gives you more content to browse that is oftentimes relevant to you as well. Your friends are your friends because you share common interests - so I find there is often interesting things going on in the ticker feed as well.
You have to have your facebook window wide enough (or maximized) for the sidebar button to appear. It will be in the lower right corner of the window like you see below.
The sidebar is split top and bottom where the top is the "ticker" and the bottom is the chat window. Depending on your feelings about chat, you can turn chat entirely off. However you can also restrict your chat availabilty only to certain people and not be visible to your ENTIRE friends list. I like that latter option and I'll post more about that topic sometime. If you dig in a little to the chat settings you'll see that option.
The top and bottom has a horizontal split bar that you can drag up or down to re-proportion how much you want to see of either the ticker or chat list.
One feature about the ticker that I like is that you can hover over the items and the corresponding post that someone interacted with will pop up. Then you can decide to click on it or not if you want to see more.
There you have it - the ticker - another facebook feature easily overlooked. I like it. Give it a try by turning it on. What do you think?
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