Today, Facebook announced a major new feature that lets you “subscribe” to any user on the site. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has always been much more about your personal social network vs your public network of random people who are somewhat interested in the same things or topics. The problem is, without the public social interactions, FB is limited by the information it can surface through its network. Twitter can show all the latest tweets on trending topics — Facebook can have a better idea of topics that are trending, since it’s larger in its user base than Twitter, but it can’t show people you don’t know that information.

Facebook was never worried Twitter would overtake it as a social network — Twitter, despite gaining quite a good chunk of users — is still a niche experience, targeted at a very specific type of person that feels the need to throw out 140-character thoughts to the rest of the world. Trust me, it’s hard to say anything significant in 140 characters, and it’s even harder to have any sort of meaningful conversation with that limit. But Facebook was jealous of Twitter’s ability to make all of its data public.

Then came Google Plus, which launched recently, and has garnered quite a following. Facebook must be a little scared now. Scared enough to release a new feature which essentially turns Facebook into Google Plus. Why? Google Plus is an imperfectly designed cross between the public following and sharing that happens on Twitter and the friends-only sharing that happens on Facebook. The Facebook subscribe feature is designed to give users more control over what they see from their friend’s status updates (therefore making them more likely to add more friends) and then to offer up additional public information, to give Facebook data that can be shown and used lots of places other than on your profile/wall.

This post is not about the sorting power subscription gives you on people you’re already friends with — I find that added functionality really cool, if it works, but it’s clear this feature is primarily to get more public content on Facebook, plus to remind everyone that they have control of their stream on Facebook so they don’t up and switch to G+, where similar control was built into the system from the get go.

It’s a necessary addition, and seems fairly well thought out for a Facebook feature, but it still feels like an “oh shit, we need to be like our competitor but be just different enough so we don’t copy them exactly.” Google Plus, which I got really into early on, is unfortunately just as noisy as Twitter, though with even longer and sometimes more interesting/intelligent content, which makes it even harder to use on a regular basis. Robert Scoble recently discussed how the biggest problem right now in social is all the noise. One thing I’ve always loved about Facebook is that, although I have 916 “friends” (95% I’ve met in person and have some sort of real friendship with), I never feel like Facebook is too noisy. Sure, I miss friend’s updates all the time, but whenever I’m on Facebook I see posts written by people I know, and this is extremely engaging. It makes me — and clearly millions of other people — spend a lot of time on Facebook.

The problem with adding a subscribe feature to Facebook is that FB is going to become just as noisy as Google and Twitter. It will hurt the site in its current implementation, which, from what I can tell, lets you subscribe to anyone on the site and, when they post publicly, you see their updates. Subscribe to one person and this might not be that bad — subscribe to one person that updates publicly frequently and this could be a big problem. Suddenly your only real “social” network is one big RSS feed of strangers.

Facebook really, really wants people to start posting publicly. The challenge there is Facebook wins at social networking because people don’t have to post publicly. It takes your personal social interactions and provides an online home for those meaningful conversations to happen. Even if they’re  I don’t know about you, but the content I share on my public accounts on Google+ and Twitter is very different from what I share on Facebook. While FB still will let you post private and friends only updates, there is no way to hide public updates from your friends (at least, not from what I can tell.) I already post on Facebook too frequently, but to build up a real following through subscriptions, I’d have to post much more frequently, publicly, and what i’d do is lose a lot of my real “friends.”

A while ago, I started a “page” for myself because I wanted a public presence on Twitter. It doesn’t really make sense to have a page, as it’s extremely awkward to ask people to “like” me (heck, I can’t bring myself to like the page, because it would tell all my friends “Adena likes Adena DeMonte.” I believe there’s a real need for a social network, Facebook or otherwise, to get the private-vs-public sharing conundrum down. Facebook has a great shot at succeeding here because they have the network. But first, they need to get the following pieces right:

Give people a reason to update publicly. It can’t just be about status, because while status will work for the types that flock to Google+ and even Twitter, who are in it for self and company promotion, Facebook needs other reasons to increase public sharing.

Social games are a great place to start. Facebook has many of its users playing social games, but you can only “play” with your friends — or, if the game lets you play with other users on Facebook, you have to friend them to stay in touch. But FB hasn’t been set up to follow people that you’re not actual friends with. This limits the reach of the game experience. With the subscribe feature, you could follow other users who like to play the same games, and connect with them outside of the context of the game.

This also extends to other experiences on Facebook apps and pages. Facebook has tons of public engagement outside of its user’s walls. But if it tries to push this public sharing and viewing of content in the same wall / stream where the friends content is shared and viewed, it’s going to hurt FB in the long run. The best bet is for Facebook is to:

• - create a separate section from your main stream where you can view activity from people you are “subscribed” to
• - push subscribing via pages, social games, and other apps within Facebook
• - offer suggested users based on shared interests, not who your friends are following
• - have some sort of stats shown to you of how many public updates you’ve shared vs. friends only
  (this is a major problem on G+, as most “normal” people use it for friends sharing only, so subscribing/following them is worthless. I am following over 1000 people on there and I probably see updates from the same 10 people who post publicly on a frequent basis, in addition to random posts by Googlers who share publically more frequently than other folks.)

Here is the most clear example of this problem — Mark Zuckerberg has over 500,000 subscribers (myself included) and this is what his page looks like:

If Mark Z. isn’t going to create public updates, who will? (I guess people following him now see that he likes Steve Jobs and is subscribing to other people…)

VS Google’s Larry Page…

Larry posts quite a bit, as do most of the Google executives, over on G+. I’ve seen Marisa Meyer’s Chiluly installation in her apartment, because she gets that if Google is going to encourage its users to share interesting content publicly, she has to be willing to share as well.

Like on G+, The people who post publicly will be the tech nerds whose careers are fueled by their online reputation. Twitter is a slightly different animal as it’s accepted that you post public content on there about mainstream or niche topics, and people interested in those topics will find you and engage with you.)

If people who you subscribe to never post publicly, then the few people who do post a lot will hurt the experience. Their content may be good, it may be bad, it doesn’t matter. The biggest problem is it will be the majority of public content, and it will very quickly eat up a user experience on Facebook. Algorithms limiting this can help, but it’s hard to stop the noise and display the relevant content.

Will the next generation just make their entire lives public? If privacy is still a concern, and I’d put my money on it being a major concern for the majority of people, the social network that gets this equation right will be able to:

1. Have quality content produced by subject-matter experts (not just technology experts)
2. Have a solid way to find people who are sharing useful and interesting content about topics that matter to you
3. Have a way of encouraging people (other than technology experts & social media nerds) to share quality content publicly and frequently…
4. …but not too frequently
5. Make sure the updates from real friends take priority over the rest of the content
6. Make sure that people feel their friends-only posts are safely friends only
7. Add value for users who share publicly (status? — if status, your public sharing should help promote your profile, vs just being a person who never updates publicly but is known by a lot of people; or, better access to relevant content?)
8. Make sharing limits longer than 500 characters
9. Let users put other users into lists to view content from only that list (like G+’s circles)
10. Convince Mark Zuckerberg to write frequent, interesting public updates.
    Because, if the CEO won’t drink the company’s public post kool-aid, and he has 500k followers (growing at about 20k every few minutes!) then who will?