Regardless of what you think about the "updates" Facebook regularly unleashes on its users, one thing is for sure: they'll keep coming. The latest changes are disturbing for reasons other than minor discomfort with the way your news feed page looks now; one can be flat-out intrusive and invites peepers into your personal life if you, and your friends, do not have privacy settings to keep out such voyeurs! If you have not yet, change your Facebook settings now so that strangers can't view your personal information. What's more, make sure your kids' setting are changed as well; there are way too many creeps who are trolling FB pages for young victims. Here's a brief article I wrote about this topic, and easy directions to fix the problem. (For now.)
New to Facebook - Subscribers
Subscribers are basically folks who want to see all your public posts in their newstream, without actually having you agree to be their friend. You can turn off the ability for people to stalk...er, subscribe to you if you do not want this. This is pretty much like those who "follow" others on Twitter. Except, of course, Twitter is a much different type of information-sharing community. And, on FB, your friends' settings can also make some of your comments to them public and viewable by subscribers even if none of your settings are "public".
Most of the folks I know who use FB do so to be able to interact with people they actually know since so many more types of information are shared on FB as opposed to a community where communications are made 140 characters at a time. So, if you are not comfortable having someone you've never heard of before, or someone you know but who you would rather not know, stalking you and your wall posts, photos, videos, etc. on FB, you can turn off the ability for folks to "subscribe" to you.
Most of you will have had "subscribers" turned on when FB switched to this new format. To disallow folks from subscribing to you do the following:
1. Go to your profile (click your name at the top right portion of the screen to get there)
2. Click Subscribers link on the left menu
3. Click the Edit Settings button in the top right part of your screen
4. Click "Off" in the drop down menu to the right of "Subscribers"
Note: when you hide or decline a friend request, that person can still subscribe to your public updates if you have allowed subscribers. So, if you don't want people you don't know seeing all your posts automatically within their newstream, including your comments to others, turn off subscribers.
