Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Facebook Wants Writers and Famous People to Promote Its New Subscribe Feature

Facebook will “imminently” launch a plugin for reporters and public figures to ask their readers to subscribe on Facebook directly from their own Web sites, VP Joanna Shields said at LeWeb in Paris today. Once they’re subscribed to those people, users will automatically see their updates included in Facebook’s newsfeed.

The tool will be similar to the “Like” button plugin, which connects users to Facebook fan and brand pages from around the Web. It’s also close to Twitter’s follow button, and for that matter it could be an alternative to the standard Web format of RSS feeds.

Of course, the reporters and public figures actually have to write the updates they send to subscribers. That part is not necessarily automatic.

Until recently, Facebook had allowed users to create “Notes” (the Facebook version of blogs) automatically by importing posts from RSS feeds. It removed support for that feature last month.

(Image credit: Flickr user tlillis4)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald