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21 sep. 2010

“Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature”

A few days ago, Facebook made what seemed to be a small tweak to its Friend Requests area. As first noted by Inside Facebook, the social network changed the way friend rejections work. Previously, you could either Confirm or Ignore (deny) a request. Now, Ignore has been replaced by “Not Now”. This new option takes some of the pressure of you having to reject people as it instead moves them into a state of limbo, where they’re neither accepted nor rejected. But it actually does a lot more as well.

You see, when someone requests to be your friend on Facebook, this automatically subscribes them to all of your public (“Everyone”) posts in their News Feed. […] Facebook has to know that most people are probably going to hit this Not Now button once and forget about it. And that’s exactly why this change creates a de-facto follow feature.

I couldn’t figure out what the point of the “Not Now” was; now it makes sense. Facebook remains dead set on its passive-aggressive suicide strategy, and on never ever offering the functionality that its users actually expect.

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