Facebook Now Recommends People to Subscribe to

The new subscribe feature of Facebook seems to have lot in common with Twitter but with one key difference - if you follow someone on Twitter, you get to see all their shares whereas if you subscribe to someone on Facebook, you only see stuff that they have specifically made 'public.'

Today, Facebook has added a new feature where they recommend you other public Facebook profiles to subscribe to and these recommendations are probably based on your existing subscriptions (see screenshot). Twitter too has a similar recommendation engine which offers suggestions based on who you are currently following.

Twitter has a valid reason to worry here. They just touched 100 million users while Facebook has a 750+ million user base and people spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the web. Twitter only recently added support for multimedia while Facebook does a far better job at rendering shared content with rich snippets and inline previews.

I created my Twitter account some five years and it has taken me all this time to reach a few thousand followers. I enabled subscriptions for my Facebook profile a few days ago and the number of subscribers has already crossed the first thousand mark. That's just because of the sheer reach of Facebook.

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Add a Subscribe Button to your Facebook Profile

Like most other Facebook users, I have a public page where I share updates from my blog and a personal profile which is private and I primarily use it for connecting with my offline friends and family members.

Most of the stuff that I share on my personal Facebook profile – like pictures of kids, songs, cooking recipes, etc. – would be extremely boring to the external world and, fortunately, they don’t get to see any of that.

Having said that, I occasionally post updates on my personal profile page that could be of interest to a wider audience and I would therefore be more than happy if people - who are not my “friends” on Facebook - can see or comment on them. How can you do that without making your profile public?

Facebook has just added a new option to profile pages that would let people “subscribe” to your profile just like the way people follow you on Twitter. Whenever you post an update on Facebook with the privacy set as “public,” it will appear in the news stream of your subscribers.

To put this in more simple terms, Subscribe is to Facebook profiles what Like is to Facebook pages. The only difference is that you get each and update when your “like” a Facebook page whereas you only get public updates when your “subscribe” to a Facebook profile.

You can subscribe to my public Facebook updates at facebook.com/agarwal.amit.

If you would like to add the Subscribe button to your own Facebook profile, go here. Before you do that, it may be a good idea to double-check that only stuff that you really want to share with non-friends is public.

To confirm, go your Facebook profile page, hit the “View As” button and then click the “public” link to see what updates in your profile are public. You can have unlimited number of subscribers to your profile but you can subscribe to a maximum of 5,000 profiles.

You can download this PDF, courtesy the Facebook Public Figures page, to learn more about the new Subscribe option and how it differs from a regular Facebook page.

On a related note, Facebook is using the standard RSS icon with the new Subscribe feature which is confusing because, technically, these aren’t really RSS feeds – you can’t get them in, say, Google Reader.

Also see: Customize your Facebook Profile

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