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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.

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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.

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