As you’ve probably heard by now, yesterday, among several other new features, Facebook launched the new and cool “Subscribe” option. This is great for people who have more than 5,000 friends or want to let people who aren’t their friends read what they post on Facebook. The obvious comparison is Twitter, where anyone can follow you and your Tweets (unless you’ve set your account to private) and they don’t need to request to follow you or be your friend. Up until now, the only way anyone could see your status updates in their Facebook news feed was to request to be a friend and for you to accept. Now, however, you have the option to add the “Subscribe” feature to your profile page and let anyone who subscribes read what you post.
Yesterday I activated the Subscribe button for my profile page and gained some subscribers right away but so far I haven’t subscribed to anyone myself. So, imagine my surprise this morning when I checked my Facebook news feed and saw a (1) next to “Subscriptions” in my tab links. Obviously I was curious to see who I’d subscribed to while I was apparently sleep walking last night so I clicked the link and found that for some reason, out of all the interesting people on Facebook I could have subscribed to, I had subscribed to Chad Hurley, the CEO of Delicious.
Now, I don’t have anything against Mr. Hurley and I’m sure he’s quite fascinating, but until this morning, I have never visited his Facebook profile page and I know for a fact I never Subscribed to him. So, how did this happen? The only conclusion I can make is that Facebook is auto subscribing us to people. I reported this on my profile this morning and heard from two people who say they had been auto subscribed to Robert Scoble and others to Mark Zuckerberg. Frankly, Mark Zuckerberg makes sense, sort of the way new members of MySpace automatically got Tom Anderson as their first friend, but Robert Scoble?
Twitter and Google+ both have “suggested followers” lists of popular and famous people which helps new members jump start their accounts, but has Facebook actually taken that concept to a new level and rather than just suggesting people to subscribe to, will be subscribing us automatically? It sure looks that way. Apparently their tactic of turning things on by default and expecting us to opt-out rather than giving us the choice and letting us opt-in — similar to the way anyone can add you to a group — is being applied to Subscriptions and we’ll suddenly start seeing updates from people we don’t know in our News Feeds and we’ll have to unsubscribe from the ones we don’t want to hear from.
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