Subscriptions Let You Have Your Cake And Eat It Too

Facebook launched a new service last week called Subscriptions. This new feature gives you the power to post material to your profile publicly for the whole world to see, without having to expose your personal information by friending everyone.

No, this is not another one of those stealth changes that just made all of your info public. You don’t need to rush to turn off the feature and adjust your privacy settings. You’re safe—it’s off by default and only uses content you share publicly already. Nowadays I would assume most of you are pretty locked down with everything only viewable to your friends, right? If not, you should be.

Subscriptions look to be Facebook’s long awaited answer to Twitter. The change was most likely inspired by Google+ too based on other recent revisions made to the social networking site.

This feature will be popular among celebrities, journalists and other public figures who don’t want to mix personal with professional when it comes to Facebook. No need for separate Fan Pages to keep things apart anymore. Now you can post content publicly with your existing profile for fans or readers to see. You won’t have to friend them!

Subscriptions also allow you to decide what content will appear in your news feed from your friends (who you’re already subscribed to by default).

Up until now if your post-happy friend Steve was flooding your news feed with status updates, your only options were to remove him or hide all of his posts. All or nothing. Now you can keep Steve around, but choose what updates of his you see. Status updates? Uncheck!

You can find Subscriptions in the left hand menu under your profile picture. For a full list of FAQs, visit Facebook’s help center. Have fun!