Facebook recently added a number of friend-related options that are reminiscent of Google+, and now it appears that the dominant social-networking site is taking a page from Twitter.
Facebook on Wednesday unveiled the "Subscribe" button, which will allow you to subscribe to, or follow, people and read their public posts. The site also rolled out new options for how much information shows up in your news feed.
The Subscribe button is intended to connect you with "interesting people you're not friends with—like journalists, artists and political figures," Zach Rait, a software engineer at Facebook, wrote in a blog post.
If you see a Subscribe button on someone's profile, click it to receive updates from that person in your feed. You won't be "friends" with them or see private posts, but if they make something public, like a link to an article or new project, it'll show up in your feed.
"Just like with friends, you can choose how many and what types of updates you see after you've subscribed," Rait wrote.
If you want to add a Subscribe button to your own profile, meanwhile, visit the subscription page and click "Allow Subscribers."
"Once you allow subscribers, you can decide who can comment and what notifications you get," Rait said. "You'll also see a Subscribers tab on your profile, where you can find out who subscribes to you."
As for existing friends, Facebook is adding the ability to more tightly control what you see from certain people. At this point, you can hide a friend from your news feed, but what if you just want to block their constant Farmville updates?
Using the Subscribe button, you can choose to see: all updates, which is everything that friend posts; most updates, which is the amount you normally see; and important updates only, like a new job or a move. You can drill down further, however, and opt to see just photos from one friend or no game stories from another, for example.
Subscribe features are rolling out now and should be available to all users in the coming days.
Facebook launched Pages about a year back, which offers users the ability to subscribe to updates from a company or other entity, which is very much like the new Subscribe feature, Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering at Facebook, said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
"If you don't want to deal with it, you don't have to," he said. "Not everyone is going to want people to follow [them], so that's why we wanted to have people explicitly enable it. Other people don't want to have their public updates shared."
The Subscribe option comes one day after Facebook unveiled a new friends list feature that will let you more easily categorize groups of friends. With the new lists, you can create your own lists and manage what friends appear in them, but Facebook will also automatically group people into work, school, family, and city lists based on the information they provide in their profile. The social-networking site has also set up a "close friends" and "acquaintances" option.
That came several weeks after Facebook updated its security features in order to more clearly help users define who could see what information. For more, see the slideshow below.