It appears that Facebook will be conforming with social naming norm. The Verge is reporting that all of the
“subscribe” actions are going to be converted to “follow” actions. This will not change the “friend” functionality, rather is simply a name change for the subscribe feature.
The name change appears to be a play to entice more users to follow celebrities on Facebook. Following has been the long-time verb of record when describing a 1-way connection in social, not Facebook’s “subscribe” verbiage. Additionally, the “subscribe” feature could be misleading as users can subscribe to an entity but not see low quality posts in the news feed — even though they subscribed.
Facebook made the following statement about the name shift:
“Starting today we are updating the term “Subscribe” to become “Follow” across the site as we found it is a term that resonates better with people on the service. Nothing is changing about how the feature works.”
For more info, see The Verge.
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