Posted in: Online Services, Social Networks

Facebook introduces subscriptions, improved friend lists

Taking a leaf out of Google+’s book, Facebook has added a couple of new and useful features. First is subscriptions. Earlier, you had to be friends with someone to read their posts on Facebook unlike on Google+ or Twitter where anyone can read anyone’s post.

With subscriptions, you can now go to someone’s Facebook profile and subscribe to their posts, so that they start appearing on your timeline without the need for the two of you to be friends. You can choose how many and what kind of posts appear on your. For example, you can disable Farmville posts from the said person if that irks you.

Similarly, others can subscribe to your posts as well. Fortunately, subscriptions are opt in and you have to manually enable it, which you can do by going here. You also have the choice of whether you want your subscribers to comment on your posts. When you make a new post, you also have the option to share it with just your friends or with everyone.

Facebook has also improved user lists and added something called Smart Lists. Smart Lists goes through your and your friend’s profiles and create automatic user lists that include people with common interests. So if you work in the same company as some of your friends, a new list will be created with all these people in one list. These lists are automatically updated and new people will be added if they fit the criteria of the list.

You can also create a close friends and acquaintances list so you only see posts from people you care about. Lastly, while sharing a post, you can choose to share it with just one of these lists instead of with all your friends.

You can read about it in detail in the source links below.

Source 1Source 2

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