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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.
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..?
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.
