The Facebook news feed has changed and it will probably continue to be tweaked.
The whole idea from Facebook is to show you things that you interact with the most, or is the most popular, likes that you follow so that you can see all that without having to scroll down the page and look for it so much.
It will pop it up to the top on Facebook when you see your profile.
You can select what should be a top story by clicking “Mark as Top Story” on the blue tag button you can see top left in the box of the news update. The arrow button top right when you hover over gives you more options including hiding this news item, all items from this page or profile and report as spam. You can also order by Most Recent as well as “Top News”
The average user is not always online, they check their profile for half an hour and scroll around looking for interesting news updates.
The ticker on the right will have stuff like your Auntie Eileen having a birthday and you´ll see people commenting. Before what would happen is that stuff would be filling up your news feed. You won´t then have to look at it. If you want to get involved with it you can click on the item in the ticker news feed. It will then appear on your news feed after refreshing the page as the ticker is live, your news feed isn´t.
The ticker which will show “light weight” stuff may have some ramifications for business pages as some of the feed may not now show up on the news feeds of its fans. But I am seeing updates from pages I follow on my news feed.
Its not as bad as some people are making out as Facebook are trying to make it quicker to find stuff. Its still new so we shall see how it develops. Hubze have a blog post showing how if you don´t want this you can get rid of it and never have to see the Facebook ticker or top stories again.