How likely would you be to start stalking your Facebook friends if it were to save you time and allow for a more meaningful experience on the social network?

So Facebook is twiterizing… again. Mashable and AllFacebook are both calling it “HUGE”. Although the new feature offers some interesting engagement opportunities, it’s actually not that new. But let’s look at the “HUGEness” first. The scoop resides in a test feature Facebook is currently running and dubbing: “Subscribe”. Note they didn’t call it “follow”, it’s got to look genuine.

Soon you’ll be able to ‘subscribe’ to friends activities on Facebook and be notified about every single move they make. If all goes well, you’ll soon be able to see under the avatar of everyone of your friends this little link:

Facebook Subscribe Feature

With this nifty feature, every time you get on Facebook you’ll have notifications about everything the subscribed to person(s) did and you’ll be able to clamor your attention to the chosen one(s), making them feel good about how “interesting” their post was that it prompted you to comment and show how much attention you pay to them by the same token. Notwithstanding the little thrill you do now get when you comment on a post in the minute following its publication when, by pure chance, you ran into a post about which you had something to say from someone you actually care about .

“Chance” is the key word here, because up until now with your ever growing stream of friends and liked pages filling your timeline with their updates. Only Chance could hook you up with posts you actually cared about. With an ever bloating timeline one wonders how many are loosing interest in even looking at it; expecting it as so many times before, to be filled with the same old posts from that childhood classmate you just cannot come to terms with dropping or hiding.

Facebook Subscribe Notifications (Credit: Mashable)

Not anymore, assuming you are willing to have your notification box filled to the breams, you’ll now be able to create your own “nichework”, to hone in on and cultivate as well as your stalking abilities. Will that equte to less time spent aimlessly scanning your Facebook timeline? Will that mean more and better engagement?

Facebook Subscribe via SMS

The feature is in effect not entirely new since you can already subscribe to, or stalk, friends by clicking this little known link title “subscribe via SMS”. This action gets you an SMS about everything a friend initiates; i.e. will not notify of likes or check-in, as the new feature won’t either as reported by AllFacebook and so far confirmed by a Facebook statement to them:

“This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes).”

The new feature would be a boon for businesses from an engagement standpoint allowing them to react to their fans activity in a timely fashion, and in particular if users can also subscribe to activities of pages; how often do you, if ever, check your “updates” section on Facebook?

This will certainly modify the flow of communication on Facebook and make it closer in speed, and potentially in volume, to Twitter’s. Isn’t that what Facebook is looking for? It is very similar to creating Twitter lists or saving searches but with the added bonus of notifications allowing for a faster response and maybe better engagement.

This indeed constitues further Twiterization of Facebook since the micro-blogging platform allows notifications about:

Credit: TheOatmeal.com

• Specific people you choose via SMS but those quickly get drowned by DMs notifications, which turns on automatically if you “subscribe” to certain people
• Mentions of yourself, if you use certain clients such as Echofone on an iPhone, via “notifications”
• Direct messages (DMs) via SMS — feature they should allow to turn off as most of it is spam or auto-reponses — which is the equivalent of Facebook messages

Could this really mean a better, more meaningful Facebook experience? Or will it mean more people turning into “Rashes” and “sucking at Facebook“?

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What do you think? Will you use this feature?

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