Facebook has introduced “Subscribe” button like Following on Twitter and Circling in Google+

Facebook has announced a new feature called the “Subscribe” button. That is; if you are interested to hear from some individual’s like journalists, artists and political figures but you personally do not know them, so adding them as your friends and asking them to accept your friend requests is really not a good idea, it actually never was a good idea which Facebook now has identified and gave you the option to “Subscribe” their statuses and posts.

The same way you can allow other users from Facebook to “Subscribe” to your public posts if you want to. Click here to set your profile to allow non-friends to subscribe to your public posts. Your private posts (the posts shared with your friends or friends of friends or limited individuals) will not be shared to public and will not be visible to your subscribers who are non-friends.

Until now, it hasn’t been easy to choose exactly what you see in your News Feed. Maybe you don’t want to see every time your brother plays a game on Facebook, for example. Or maybe you’d like to see more stories from your best friends, and fewer from your coworkers.

You also couldn’t hear directly from people you’re interested in but don’t know personally—like journalists, artists and political figures.

With the Subscribe button, we’re making it easier to do both. In the next few days, you’ll start seeing this button on friends’ and others’ profiles. You can use it to:

  1. Choose what you see from people in News Feed
  2. Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
  3. Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends

Isn’t that like following someone on Twitter to hear from him/her? or like you Circle people on Google+ to hear from them?

Yes of course it is.

It’s really going to be entertaining more than a serious war between social networks. We’ve seen major changes within Facebook after Google+ streamline of features. e.g. the very first change we noticed in Facebook was the re-prioritizing of news feed with every next activity on the post that is; a popular post will never die in your news feed and will be re-ranked on top with every next comment in it, that’s what we found first in Google+. Secondly Facebook added another Google+ feature “in-line privacy settings” – that is; you can set with each of your post to share with specific people and individuals as well as with public.

Now these “Public” posts are what will be shared to your subscribers..

In early stages of Google+, there has been a huge discussions for the differences between Facebook and Google+, saying that Google+ is not at all a Facebook replacement or Google+ is not just like Facebook and it serves the bests of Facebook and Twitter along within a single platform. Also a huge strength of Facebook fans just kept denying the quick success of Google+ that Google+ can’t beat Facebook or whatever.

Well those all are going to be false debates now. They were true anyway that Google+ was strictly not like Facebook considering its own way of serving the social community which more tends towards online social advertisement.

 

But now what? Facebook is following the same way? 

That is the question I’ll ask from all of those defending Facebook and saying that what Google+ is serving, is impractical.

 

Well I appreciate that Facebook is adopting features which really were good in Google+ and serving the community in better way to allow them fully control their privacy.

 

Read more at official announcement at Facebook Blog Post.

Start letting people to Subscribe your posts. Get your own Subscribers