The news-feed, a constantly updating, “feed” _of _stories _from pages or people you’ve subscribed to, or those who are part of your friend list.
The Mobile App had this _notifier _feature that would inform you of any recent activity, new stories, that have to be displayed on the _news-feed.

story notifier - Android

The  “New Stories”  notifier from ‘Facebook for Android’

Now Facebook brings the same feature to its Web version, _though things work a _li’l _differently here, yet I assure you, it _does work, infact, better. _So, this new feature is nicely integrated into the new “bar” introduced along with the graph search, and whenever there’s some _recent activity (that’s too noble to be displayed in the ticker _and thus is included in the news feed), It’ll display a small _counter _next to the _Home _button/link on the top-left part of the _bar.

HOME-notify

The notifier from the ‘web version’ of Facebook. See the 2? yeah thats the ‘counter.’