Facebook Subscribe Button For Publishers On the Way

Facebook reportedly announced on stage at the LeWeb conference that it will soon be launching a Subscribe button for publishers.

This will apparently be one of the company’s social plugins, which include: the Like Button, the Send Button, Comments, the Activity Feed, Recommendations, the Like Box, the Login Button, Registration, the Facepile and the Live Stream.

Back in September, Facebook launched the Subscribe button – a button on people’s Facebook profiles that allows users to subscribe to their public updates even if they are not friends, effectively making Facebook more usable in a Twitter-esque or Google+-esque kind of way.

According to Matt Brian at TheNextWeb, Facebook’s Joanna Shields said on stage that the button will allow Facebook users to subscribe to updates from anywhere on the web – basically like Facebook’s version of Twitter’s Follow Button. He shares the following statement from Facebook:

“We will soon launch the Subscribe plugin, an extension of the Subscribe button, that publishers and other developers can add to their web sites to make it easy for people to connect to reporters and public figures in one click. We have no further details to share at this time.”

It’s interesting that Facebook is launching more tools around individual content authors, as opposed to just organizations – a similar emphasis to what Google has been doing around authorship in search.

Essentially, this is just another way for readers to easily follow the content authors they care about without having to be actual friends or even having to worry about finding them on Facebook.