
Facebook Launches Twitter-Like ‘Subscriptions’ - taylorbuley
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/facebook-launches-twitter-like-subscriptions-lets-you-share-with-unlimited-users/
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teej
Like many of the other features Facebook has announced recently (friend
lists), this is a redesign of a feature they've had for years.

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baddox
Is that so? I've been using friends lists for years, but I don't recall there
being a one-way subscription feature in facebook.

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joshhepworth
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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jmjerlecki
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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taylorlb
Will be a useful feature for notable people that have a 'profile' and a 'page'
and don't want to manage two properties. Now you can have as many 'followers'
as nature will allow, where as you could only have 5k 'friends'.

That said, I think Facebook is trying too hard to be everything to everyone,
which is a turn off for me.

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sek
They are scared and this is the motivator for their decisions. A company can't
act like that, this will lead to a downward spiral.

This is a common behavior of companies who are over their peak.

There is a record of companies who tried to be everything for everyone and
failed miserably.

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pork
Straw man, but nonetheless, care to substantiate with examples?

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sek
AOL is the best example and they are in the same market. IBM, Apple without
Jobs and i think Microsoft's stock correlates also to these indicators.

The economic theory behind this is very good explained in this TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...](http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html)

There are a lot of other examples of companies on their peak, acted defensive
and then failed. I would count GM as another popular example, but the ones
above are better when you compare them to Facebook.

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rfrey
"Apple without Jobs" is already a data point for failed companies?

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klausa
I think he meant 1985-1997 period.

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ahalam
If you send a friend request to some one, and they don't respond (it happens)
- you still get to see their public posts in your news stream.

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keithnoizu
I don't know if emulating competitors' feature sets is considered being
disruptive.

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athst
Every time Facebook tries to copy Twitter like this, it just makes their
product even more confusing and unfocused than it was before.

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littlegiantcap
This is a good idea, but the challenge to this is to try and keep it from
falling into the whole "friend whoring" that myspace had going. Which, in my
opinion, is part of the reason myspace died off. So if they can do this
correctly I'd love to see it, but facebook needs to tread lightly.

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kcurtin
I wonder how many features facebook can continue to add before things get too
cumbersome... I understand the vision and the fact that they want to address
all of their users' needs. But trying to integrate everything that other
social networking sites do really well seems like overkill.

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dedicated
I wonder how many casual Facebook users will understand this feature and find
it useful. Seems like the main beneficiaries of getting subscribers are one-
person fan pages, like Scoble. But they already have a following on Twitter
and G+.

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elb0w
AKA RSS

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rektide
Facebook: give me back my RSS feeds, you bastards.

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zacharycohn
If someone can "subscribe" to me without me approving them, it seems like
there's a major privacy concern there (what else is new...)

One benefit to the two-way friend/approve system was if your teacher, boss,
parent, or stalker try to friend you, you can deny it and they can't see your
info. It seems like now they can just subscribe and you don't even know..?

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zdrtx
Subscribers can only see your public posts. You can still control the privacy
of your photos, information, etc. by setting the privacy to friends only or
friends of friends. You can also choose to not allow anyone to subscribe to
you.

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liuliu
Allowing people to subscribe you need you to opt-in first. It is not a
default-to-opt-in thing.

