New York — In an attempt to further colonize areas of the web currently outside its domain, popular social media outfit Facebook, reaping the success of its “Like” button and the recent introduction of “Subscribe” for profiles, on Thursday released the option to add a “Subscribe” button for third-party Web sites, allowing site visitors to get updates from journalists and other site contributors in their News Feeds and brands beyond the boundaries of Facebook.com.
Addressing the reporters at LeWeb 2011 in Paris, Joanna Shields, VP & Marketing Director for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) announced that the world’s largest social network is rolling out a new Subscribe button that will allow Facebook users to subscribe to user updates anywhere on the web, according to TechCrunch.
However, this latest plugin is, which can be installed on any Web site, is identical to Facebooks’s Follow button, which can be embedded on websites would allow visitors to subscribe to updates with the click of the button to begin following all of the news from a journalist, celebrity, public figure, politician, celebrity they want to follow on Facebook.
“The Subscribe button for Websites acts just like the button on Facebook; once clicked the user will begin seeing the public posts of the person they have subscribed to in his or her News Feed,” Facebook said in a blog post. “The subscribe action is also shared—allowing others to subscribe directly via the News Feed stories, and further increasing viral distribution.”
A Facebook spokesperson quoted as saying by Siliconrepublic.com: “We will soon launch the Subscribe plug-in, an extension of the Subscribe button, that publishers and other developers can add to their websites to make it easy for people to connect to reporters and public figures in one click. We have no further details to share at this time,” the spokesperson said.
Previously, users could just “Like” or “Recommend” a single posts on sites. But this would obviously be one of the company’s social plugins, which include: the Like Button, the Send Button, Comments, the Activity Feed, Recommendations, the Like Box, the Login Button, Registration, the Facepile and the Live Stream.
The Subscribe button is already appearing on pages of several media partners, including Absolute Radio, AllThingsD, ANSA.it, The Daily Beast / Newsweek, Forbes.com, GQ Italia, The Huffington Post, Mashable, Ministry of Sound, msnbc.com, NME.Com, TechCrunch, TIME.com, TODAY.com, and washingtonpost.com.
On the other hand, as numerous brands and personalities are utilizing both Pages and a personal profile, the social media giant wanted to provide an option for users to publicly broadcast their updates without having to add friends build a separate Page.
However, this latest plug-in offers an excellent opportunity for brands, personalities and news-makers alike to cash-in-on that wish to use their Facebook account to deliver breaking or important updates. The feature will only work for users who have already enabled Subscribe on Facebook.
Back in September, the social media giant Facebook unveiled the “Subscribe” option, a button on people’s Facebook profiles that allows users to subscribe to their public updates even if they are not friends, effectively making Facebook more usable in a Twitter-esque or Google+-esque kind of way.