Facebook, in a rare coup, has rolled out a new sharing feature without somehow completely botching its privacy implications and freaking everyone out. It sounds scary — people you aren’t friends with can read your updates — but it’s opt-in! Thanks, Mark.
The Subscribe Button is meant to let you follow (HELLO, TWITTER!) “interesting” people you aren’t friends with, like Mark Zuckerberg and other venerable public figures. You can also set your account to be followed, making public status updates of your choosing.
Basically, if you don’t care about this, you don’t have to do anything, and it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Which is how everything on Facebook should be. I’m hoping Facebook’s learned from its past mistakes that not everyone wants to gyrate and writhe in Zuckerberg’s Roman orgy of life sharing.
But isn’t this entire thing what Facebook Pages are for? Why would Beyoncé set her account as followable when she has a fan page for that? Why would any remotely famous person not do the same thing? Who would want strangers reading what they say, if not on Twitter? Do you? [Facebook]