Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off.
To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up". That's what facebok is doing. Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$