Facebook to launch a Subscribe button for websites ‘imminently’
Speaking on stage at LeWeb 2011, Joanna Shields, VP & Marketing Director EMEA at Facebook announced that the world's largest social network is to launch a new Subscribe button that will allow Facebook users to subscribe to user updates anywhere on the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joanna Shields, Facebook's VP & Marketing Director EMEA, used the LeWeb 2011 stage to announce that the Subscribe button — already a way for users to follow public figures inside Facebook — will extend to any website 'imminently', letting the network's more than 800 million members subscribe to updates wherever they browse.
The announcement lands in a busy week for the company: Facebook has just confirmed its acquisition of location startup Gowalla, unveiled its new 1 Hacker Way Menlo Park address, published its Memology 2011 trend review, and laid out plans to hire thousands of engineers including a new New York team — a pattern of expansion that this off-site widget fits squarely into.
First-order effects
- Website publishers gain an embeddable button that pipes Facebook's 800-million-member audience directly into their update streams, no friend request required.
- Facebook users can follow public figures and site updates from anywhere on the web, decoupling subscription from the mutual-friend model.
Second-order effects
- Every embedded button carries Facebook's identity layer onto third-party pages, extending the company's social graph and advertising surface well beyond facebook.com.
- Publishers weighing subscription widgets now benchmark against Facebook's reach, pressuring smaller follow/subscribe mechanisms to justify their place on the page.
Third-order effects
- If the embed pattern holds, follow buttons become default web infrastructure, concentrating subscription identity and the data it generates around a handful of large platforms rather than individual sites.
The trend: Social platforms are pushing their follow graphs off-site, turning third-party websites into distribution nodes for platform-owned subscriptions.