Facebook's New Updates to News Feed,so that you never miss friends updates

Facebook is launching a series of changes to the News Feed, including the addition of a real-time “ticker.”

The first change is designed to make it possible to see all the big events in your friends’ lives since the last time you checked your feed, regardless of whether it’s been three minutes or three weeks. “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” Facebook says in a blog post.

To do this, it has removed the “Top Stories and “Most Recent” links on the top of the News Feed and replaced it with a smarter feed that adjusts content based on the last time you checked it. If you haven’t been on Facebook for three days, it will pull out the top stories from your network. This means you won’t miss important relationship status changes, photos or big life events.

If you’re a more frequent visitor of Facebook, your News Feed will be filled with more recent content in chronological order. The social network is also giving you the ability to tweak the top stories in your News Feeds by marking or unmarking updates as a “Top Story.”

The second change affects how photos are displayed in the News Feed. Simply put, photos will be larger and more prominent. This was one of the top user feature requests. The goal was to bring photos front and center and make them even more beautiful.

“It’s just an incredibly popular form of content,” Schacht says.

The final update Facebook is rolling out is the addition of a news ticker above the chat column on the right-hand side. The ticker, which the social network has been testing with a small group of users for the past few weeks, is a real-time feed of all the activity happening in your social graph. Unlike the News Feed, which focuses on the past, ticker focuses on present activity. Essentially, it replaces the function of the “Most Recent” section of the News Feed.

 Clicking on an item in the ticker will bring up that content in a hover window on the page, where you can comment or interact with the content in real time. Schacht says that this results in instant conversations. “By surfacing what’s happening right now anywhere on the site, we are creating shared experiences with your friends,” he says.