Facebook does it again. After a couple of months of getting "this is horrible, remove it NOW!" from "volunteer testers" (meaning people that were randomly chosen and forced to use it), they seem to be putting it out there. And I for one cannot understand why.
Who actually is interested in knowing when a friend became available for a chat? Like, everyone of their friends? Not me. I can check if they are available when I need them.
Who wants to see that a page you liked has liked some of the comments left there? Not me, I'm interested in their posts though, but not what they happen to like.
Who wants to see every "is now friends with" notification about your friends? Not me. I usually don't care about who they have friended anyway. And I can't think of any reason why someone would like to see all friend notifications immediately.
So, nice try but no cigar. It would be useful if it just scrolled the notifications in it. I do care about when people comment on my posts or posts that I've commented on etc. So they could be shown there. Currently it's just extra clutter that's distracting people.
To the point, then. If you have AdBlock Plus or some other blocking system, just add facebook.com/ajax/pagelet/generic.php/TickerPagelet to it. And the horrible thing is gone. Doesn't seem to do anything else based on my testing, but YMMV. You're welcome.