When I first got on Facebook in 2007 after much cajoling from some close friends, I found that it was a really cool platform that enabled me to keep in touch with people from different eras' in my life - school, university, former colleagues and family. FB was like my one stop button to touch base with all my "friends" on a regular basis.
Fast forward to the present, the way I use Facebook today has changed markedly from way back then. Now Facebook has had many facelifts in the last couple of years - not all of it has been welcome. But one feature definitely has my seal of approval - "Facebook Subscribe".
Yes I know that the originator of this idea was Google+ and Facebook introduced it in a bid to retain its users. Good move! Thanks to this feature, I get to subscribe to and see a side of famous personalities that I otherwise wouldn't be able to. Yes a lot of them have fan pages, but a fan page is rather impersonal in my opinion.
"Subscribe" is not just for being in the know about what famous people get up to in their daily lives. It is also a great way to keep in touch with trends and news updates from any industry you're interested in. My area of interest is publishing, journalism, social media - so via "Subscribe", I get to follow people who work in this field who have enabled "Subscribe" on their profile.
I've been subscribing since sometime last year, and it's great because I got to know a lot of interesting stuff which I might not have come across in the newspapers for instance. It is also a great way to know how people on the other side of the globe think and work.
For example, I've been subscribing to Feifei Sun, Associate Editor at TIME and Liz Heron, Social Media Editor at The New York Times. Through Sun's updates I get a behind the scenes look at how TIME approaches their stories, the rationale behind certain angles. While Heron is a good source of information on the latest in social media trends.
Some of the people I subscribe to:
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