You are not alone in finding it more and more annoying...it is increasingly less and less user friendly as far as an interface to interact with friends...it is becoming more like a website with the option to make comments. It needs to revert back to the way it was circa mid 2008 with the Wall being wholly separate from the other postings. There was a lot, lot more friend to friend direct discussion back when it was like that and other postings being separate. It was so much better and fun to be interacting with friends both current and old you haven’t seen in awhile and would otherwise not be able to keep up with so regularly - and I thought that was the purpose of facebook. Now you just post something and everything is just a reaction (if people want to even comment) to what was posted. The timeline is now especially annoying.
I found a good program that's high rated on Cnet that will fix the timeline problem. It's an easy, quick download and when installed, you'll see the "old" FB page instead of that crappy 2-column timeline.
www.timelineremove.com