Implications of The #Facebook #Subscribe Button - Pros and Cons

Since the launch of Google+ and it's success in recruiting users, Facebook has been adding new features frantically - the new photo viewing options, video chatting, new navigation bars, and most recently, the subscription button.

This new feature allows users to subscribe to updates, including photos, statuses and more, from people they aren't already Facebook Friends with. This may not seem like a big deal yet, but it opens a door to endless potentials for brands, celebrities and thought leaders for better broadcasting. Of course, on the flip side, with potential comes a great deal of risk.

Here are a few aspects I jotted down briefly:

 
Pros:

1. Facebook and Twitter just had a baby.

Facebooks, Google+, and Twitter are all unique in their own user interfaces and purposes. Twitter can be considered mass broadcasting through microblogging where anyone can tweet with or read other users' tweets, given that they're not private. Google+ is a more general interface that focuses more on user sectoring, and Facebook, the friend connector, allowing friends to catch up, learn more about, and maintain relations with one another without physically hanging out. 

However, this subscription button changes all that. Allowing users to follow others' updates without friending incorporates Twitter's broadcasting aspect, creating a TON of opportunities for celebrities, brands and others to broadcast their messages to a larger audience.

2. Better classifications of your friends and invisible stalking.

No more limited profiles, or friend requests. That's right. You no longer have to be friends with someone to stalk them if they enabled the subscription button. Also, you don't necessarily have to friend people you just met in order to see what they're up to until you hang out with them more.

With subscription, you can now classify your friends/ non-friends into lists so your updates are all categorized. You don't have to see updates of farmville or restaurant city any more. Just like twitter, you can categorize your news outlets, fashion tips, non-profit events, anything you wish so they are better organized. There are options to hide photo updates, video updates, and more from lists to make your feed more personalized.

Cons:

1. It just murdered the two-way connect flow

Facebook is unique in that it encourages a two-way communication. It's about friends and connection. The subscription button just threw all that out the window. It's true that Twitter itself focuses on engagement even though it's a free-for-all type of conversation, but the word "Facebook Friends" just got degraded.

2. New metrics needed

With public subscriptions, the measuring system just got complicated. Facebook Insights will have to come up with better metrics to measure subscriber activities.

3. Back to the Privacy Issue

I am sure most of everyone is social media savvy by now, but there are of course people who are still a little lost trying to catch up with all the tools bombarded their way. For people who want to use Facebook personally, the subscribe button may cause issues, as it allows non-friends to read your updates.

Changing its mission statement.

Just from first impressions, it seems to me that the subscription button is definitely a good move in terms of helping brands and celebrities work their marketing strategies. However, if Facebook were to follow its original 2008 mission of " “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Then the subscription button is way out of its boundaries. Its new mission statement however, became “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” This for me makes Facebook a lot more business and revenue oriented, and a little negligent of user interests.

What are your opinions on the new Facebook Subscribe button?

What you might also be interested in:

Facebook Subscribe Button: What It Means for Each Type of User

What Facebook's new Subscribe button means to brands and businesses 

The Complete Guide To Facebook’s Subscribe Button

Is Facebook slowly becoming an Ad spam?

"More than three-quarters of Facebook users think that there is a problem with spam on the site." 

- SC Magazine UK.

Facebook, since it's debut in 2004 has been holding strong. With 500 million active users and 900 million objects people can interact with, it has become much more than just profile pages (a.k.a stalking tool), but a favorite pass time with games and applications. Companies in the recent years have joined this massive community by posting events, ads, promotions and what not, but when do all this cross the line?

Some basic statistics of Facebook as of 2011:

• More than 70 translations available on the site.

• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

• Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites.

•  There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. 

 This seems like a great marketing opportunity for companies no?


Statistics of social media use and e-commerce

• 61 percent of respondents indicated that they never visit a retailers Facebook page

• 86 percent of online retailers had a Facebook page

• 23 percent said they visit retailer pages less than once a month

• Among consumers who are fans of retailers on Facebook, 68 percent are fans of 3 or fewer retailers

Information from http://www.jeffbullas.com/

"How come you didn't show up on my event last week? I invited you on Facebook!"

This seems to be a line I hear very often lately. The truth is, I stopped checking my events, or event notifications for that matter. I am no longer addicted to updating all the time, but resort to it when I need to check birthdays, or catch up on a friend's life before I meet him/her (oh shush, I'm sure you do that too).

My question is:
On average how many times do you actually read the event invitations, (now that they've added "you've been invited to..." as notifications).

How often do you check your favorite companies' Facebook page for promotion updates?

And how many times have you clicked on the ads on the sidebars?

To my feeling, the advertising and marketing side of Facebook is slowly becoming like traditional advertising, like posters on the wall or flyers laying around the dinning hall table.  

We are tuning out of it. We barely see them anymore.

There are also bogus companies faking Facebook notification e-mails, that's slowly going out of the way. So unless companies/facebook come up with some innovative/interactive way for companies to reach out to their audience, the marketing is heading towards decay.

Facebook Tetris - Rank up your brain

Look around the classroom, the study lounges, your friends' laptop screens; Facebook Tetris Battle is the new in thing for Asians. My friends and I have been Tetris battling each other at night for hours (...sad, I know, but that’s what addiction is.) So I decided to do a little research this addictive game I’m fighting against, and what I found was that playing Tetris increases brain efficiency!

Using brain imaging technology, researchers from Mind Research Network investigated 26 teenage girls playing Tetris. For 30 minutes a day for three months, these girls played Tetris (gr, I wonder if they get paid for doing it too.) There was also a control group of girls that didn't play Tetris to maintain a fair test. These girls had both structural (for assessing cortical thickness) and functional (to assess efficient activity) MRI scans before and after the three-months period.

To cut a long story short, what they found was that after three months, the brain efficiency and cortical thickness of the girls that did play Tetris were higher than those of the girls that didn't.

Dr. Richard Haier explains, "what we found was a change in the brain after playing Tetris, the thickness of the cerebral cortex actually increased, by less than half a millimetre." He continued to say how it was once thought that the number of brain cells in the brain was fixed by a certain age, but this now appears not to be true.

The cerebral cortex plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness, so I'm guessing, with the thickening of it, Tetris increases ALL THAT.

So, it's not that bad to be addicted to Tetris after all then? Stop telling me to stop playing Tetris, it's good for me.

http://ihealthbulletin.com/blog/2009/09/20/tetris-brain-cortex-thickness-teenage-girls/

http://www.articlesbase.com/shopping-articles/can-tetris-improve-your-intelligence-part-two-1245079.html