The REAL Reason for Facebook's Subscribe Button

“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.