“Subscribe,
get your issue”
-Snoop
Dogg, Drop It like It’s Hot*
You’ve
probably noticed that Facebook has recently changed its privacy
settings, now allowing you to “subscribe” to people’s public
updates without needing to add them as friends. Some might say it
complicates things. I say, things change.
I’m
sure I’m not the only one to see the motivations for Facebook’s
newest adjustment. First off, understanding your own privacy settings
has suddenly become much easier. We can now choose how much
information we want a person to see, and can view our page from the
perspective of this person to check we’ve adjusted the settings as
we want.
A
bigger driving factor: Facebook wants to take on their biggest rival,
Twitter. Twitter has gained popularity massively recently- partly due
to news of cheating footballers and sly, doomed tabloids breaking on
the site before the papers can report it. People started to try out
Twitter en masse, and saw the array of celebrities sharing updates.
It’s fascinating for movie fans and pop music lovers.
Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is just filling a gap in his product’s service,
tempting celebs to share info with their fans. Celebs don’t run
their own fan pages and they have probably set their own profiles to
the highest security settings… until now. We have already started
to see some big names adjust their settings to allow their fans to
see their personal Facebook updates through subscriptions. This will
mean celebrities' accounts, like actor Jared Leto's,
will need to be verified, in a similar way to Twitter’s system, to
prove the celeb is really the person updating the account.
I bet
that’s the covert reason for the new change. It’s all about
taking on the new competition from Twitter, disguised as a genuine
concern for the control of your privacy.
*You
can follow Snoop on Twitter. There's
a Facebook “Like” page that looks like it's ran by the man
himself. But now, Facebook are now tempting celebs to make some of
their personal updates public so that their subscribers- usually
fans- can see what they have to say. Obviously, a celeb like Snoop
might use Facebook to promote himself, making some of his updates
“public” for all to see. (There will be a small image of the
globe next to the update.) For his close friends, he can make an
update “private” for only his friends to see. For his public
updates, he should be able to syndicate his Twitter account to his
Facebook so updates appear on both simultaneously.
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