Facebook has been aggressively active in introducing updates and new features, in the past few weeks, in order to maintain its place of pride in the social networking field. Not that the social media giant has, presently, any threats worth worrying, but it is always good to be on the move. Soon after it announced an easier and functional way to organize friends and made its privacy controls more prominent and easier to use, the social network has come up with a ‘Subscribe’ button, which will allow individuals to share public content with people who ‘subscribe’ to their news feeds, rather than ‘friend’ them. The ‘Subscribe’ button will apparently replicate Twitter’s ‘follow’ model.
This button is applicable only to individuals and not businesses and brands, who will have to continue to use Pages. If a user chooses to ‘subscribe’ to another person’s news feed, they will begin to see all of that person’s public updates. This does away with the earlier need to confirm friends before a user could see another’s updates.
Facebook’s optional new button goes a little further and allows users to control the kind of updates they want to see. In a blog post, Facebook software engineer Zach Rait explained, “Until now it has not been easy to choose exactly what you see in your news feed. May be you don’t want to see every time your brother plays a game on Facebook, or may be you would like to see more stories from your best friends and fewer from your colleagues.”
Once a user has Subscribed, the button presents an option to ‘see all updates’, or ‘everything your friend posts, ‘ most updates’, ‘important updates’, or ‘just highlights like a new job or move.’
However, this does not mean that a user will have no control over who will see and comment on their updates. A user can block subscribers and control who can comment on their updates.
Offsetting the Facebook limit of 5,000 friends, there is no limit to the number of subscribers a person can have. This feature is likely to be welcomed by celebrities and politicians who maintain separate Pages for their personal and public personae. The ‘Subscribe’ button will allow them to manage friends and public posts from the same page.
The newly-introduced button is also set to change the kinetics of Facebook relationships from a two-way exchange to a one-way, publishing-and-consuming exchange like that present in Twitter or Google+.
Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s director of product put it succinctly when she remarked, “The bottom line is that public figures will now have two options. They can use whatever works for them. Folks that have multiple people posting to their Pages, or benefit from the analytics associated with Pages can continue to use Pages. Others can make public updates to subscribers via their personal profiles.”
To enable the subscription button, users need to change their settings at facebook.com/about/subscriptions. It has not yet been clarified whether akin to the ‘Like’ button, the ‘Subscribe’ button will be distributed to outside Web pages.
Facebook is keen to stress that the introduction of the ‘subscribe’ button, need not change a user’s experience if they do not wish to. They can simply ignore the ‘Subscribe’ button.
The ‘Subscribe’ button which was introduced on Wednesday, is expected to make its presence felt on the users’ accounts over the next few weeks.