Facebook Launches New Subscribe Button

Facebook launched an intriguing new feature called the Subscribe Button. This new feature adds new flexibility to the Facebook news feed while adding important features popularized by Twitter and Google +. The new button adds another layer of complexity to an interface that already bewilders many users, but the promise of removing unimportant bits of information from their news feed has many Facebook users excited.

Subscribing To Other Facebook Users

Facebook rolled out the new Subscribe Button with everyone subscribed to all updates from their friends. If users change nothing, their Facebook experience stays the same as before. However, they can edit the content received by managing their friends. Users can also change the update settings for a friend while visiting their friend’s Facebook page. Choices include life events, status updates, games, photos and important updates. These new choices make taming the Facebook news feed possible.

With their news feed bridled, Facebook users may find renewed joy in the Facebook experience. No longer sifting through junk, users will see only updates from their friends that interest them. However, subscription content from non-friends will include all their public updates, with no filter options available.

Letting Other Facebook Users Subscribe

Users can now allow non-friends to subscribe to their public status updates. Any posts, photos or other content that they deliberately mark “Public” will appear on subscribers’ walls. Users follow others like they do with Twitter or Google +. To allow Facebook users the option to subscribe to their updates, users must edit their profile and then click the “Subscribers” link under their photo. By clicking the Edit Button, users can turn the new subscriber function on and off. They can also decide whether to allow comments on their public updates.

Benefits Of The Subscribe Button

If you always wanted to get rid of all the junk in your Facebook news feed, than the unveiling of the new Facebook Subscribe Button will make your day. In the past, the only way to stop the endless parade of junk updates was to un-friend the worst offenders. Now users can keep their friends without fear because they can choose to see only the content that interests them.

The Subscribe Button also expands opportunities for all Facebook users because they can now share information with the Facebook community without allowing them access to their wall as a Friend. Similarly, the community now benefits from other users’ public information, even when they are not friends.

Analysis

Analysts will eagerly watch how the social public receives the Facebook Subscribe Button. The extra button and the new Twitter and Google + behavior may be enough to make users abandon those two competing networks to focus only on Facebook.

Others may think the added feature layer complicates a software platform that already has tons of bells, whistles and fuzzy dice hanging all over it. People alienated by the Subscribe Button may find refuge in the simpler worlds of Twitter and Google +.

Facebook holds an ace in its hand that helps guarantee the success of the new button: users must opt in. If they do not choose to use the Subscribe Button, they do nothing and their Facebook world will stay the same.

September 16, 2011