Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’ | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’

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95 pointstaylorbuley24 comments

Like many of the other features Facebook has announced recently (friend lists), this is a redesign of a feature they've had for years.

Is that so? I've been using friends lists for years, but I don't recall there being a one-way subscription feature in facebook.

It is basically what they called "Pages".

It's definitely a big redesign of the feature, but it was still possible before.

As noted by TC last year, http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/facebook-not-now-follow/, when you request to be someone's friend, you would automatically start following their "Everyone" posts without their approval. It was just following and friend requests in a single button.

This a pretty big difference though. Becoming someones friend on facebook has social implications. By friending someone you get stuck in the friend limbo stage (do I know this person, is this person a stalker, why wasn't there a message attached to the friend request, all sorts of weird things). By making this subscribe, the other person doesn't have to approve your request in essence because they decided that when they made their post public.

It happens when you "like" a page. And this became even more prominent when profile interests were changed to be liked pages.

Will be a useful feature for notable people that have a 'profile' and a 'page' and don't want to manage two properties. Now you can have as many 'followers' as nature will allow, where as you could only have 5k 'friends'.

That said, I think Facebook is trying too hard to be everything to everyone, which is a turn off for me.

They are scared and this is the motivator for their decisions. A company can't act like that, this will lead to a downward spiral.

This is a common behavior of companies who are over their peak.

There is a record of companies who tried to be everything for everyone and failed miserably.

Straw man, but nonetheless, care to substantiate with examples?

AOL is the best example and they are in the same market. IBM, Apple without Jobs and i think Microsoft's stock correlates also to these indicators.

The economic theory behind this is very good explained in this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...

There are a lot of other examples of companies on their peak, acted defensive and then failed. I would count GM as another popular example, but the ones above are better when you compare them to Facebook.

"Apple without Jobs" is already a data point for failed companies?

I think he meant 1985-1997 period.

If you send a friend request to some one, and they don't respond (it happens) - you still get to see their public posts in your news stream.

I don't know if emulating competitors' feature sets is considered being disruptive.

Every time Facebook tries to copy Twitter like this, it just makes their product even more confusing and unfocused than it was before.

This is a good idea, but the challenge to this is to try and keep it from falling into the whole "friend whoring" that myspace had going. Which, in my opinion, is part of the reason myspace died off. So if they can do this correctly I'd love to see it, but facebook needs to tread lightly.

I wonder how many features facebook can continue to add before things get too cumbersome... I understand the vision and the fact that they want to address all of their users' needs. But trying to integrate everything that other social networking sites do really well seems like overkill.

I wonder how many casual Facebook users will understand this feature and find it useful. Seems like the main beneficiaries of getting subscribers are one-person fan pages, like Scoble. But they already have a following on Twitter and G+.

AKA RSS

Facebook: give me back my RSS feeds, you bastards.

If someone can "subscribe" to me without me approving them, it seems like there's a major privacy concern there (what else is new...)

One benefit to the two-way friend/approve system was if your teacher, boss, parent, or stalker try to friend you, you can deny it and they can't see your info. It seems like now they can just subscribe and you don't even know..?

Subscribers can only see your public posts. You can still control the privacy of your photos, information, etc. by setting the privacy to friends only or friends of friends. You can also choose to not allow anyone to subscribe to you.

Allowing people to subscribe you need you to opt-in first. It is not a default-to-opt-in thing.

Ah, that info was not in the article when I read it.

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