Facebook “Subscribe” Features Lets You Friend People Without Actually Friending Them

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Facebook is ready to roll out new feature after new feature now that it has an actual rival in the social networking space. After Google+ was launched Facebook brought various features to the table, including Skype video calling support or the Circles-like smart lists for managing friends.

Today we hear that a new way of checking out what people you know are doing on Facebook will be available to those users that either don’t want to add certain people as friends, or have their friendship requests rejected. Naturally, there’s a catch.

The new button you’ll soon see when you go to Facebook is called “Subscribe.” Using it you’ll be able to subscribe to the status updates of other people and then receive in your news feed one of the three options available: all their updates, most updates or just the important updates.

Before you start asking yourself whether this new stalking method will go against your privacy principles I’ll tell you that other Facebook users won’t be able to subscribe to your news feed unless you choose to post the Subscribe button on your profile. Therefore, in case you want to make sure certain people don’t have access to your Facebook profile you’ll be able to choose not to have the new button displayed.

The new feature may be of real use to public figures that want to share updates with their fans. Facebook restricts the number of mutual friendships to 5,000, with celebrities choosing to also create Fan pages besides their regular Facebook profile in order to amass a larger followship. Companies, on the other hand, will not have access to a Subscribe feature.

The new Subscribe button seems to directly target Twitter rather than Google+, letting Facebook users choose to establish simple, but asymmetrical relationship with other people, which is something Twitter already offers, or the kind of feature the popular social network has opposed thus far.

Let us know what you feel about this new Facebook button. Will you let other people Subscribe to your status updates or will you rather keep your social activities as private as possible?