Last year, I wrote a post about Facebook introducing the Subscribe Feature. This particular post was focused on subscribing to people who were NOT your friends. It basically is a really cool way to follow people on Facebook that would never accept your friend request: movie stars, rock stars and your nerdy heroes.

But the Subscribe Feature also works with Facebook friends.

More about that in a sec, but first I want to put to rest another hoax that’s been going around on Facebook these days. Timeline is still very new for most people, and I’ve been seeing this message posted on many people’s Facebook status:

 Hi everybody. If you didn’t know already, the new FB timeline-style will be rolled this week for EVERYONE. In the timeline set-up every post you’ve ever made will be visible and available to see. I like to keep my FB private except to those I am friends with on here. So if you all would do the following, I’d appreciate it. Please do both of us a favor: Hover over my name above. In a few seconds you will see a box that says “Subscribed”. Hover over that, then go to “Comments and Likes” & unclick it. That will stop all our posts showing up on the side bar for strangers to see. But most important, it limits hackers from invading our profiles. If you re-post this I will do the same for you. You’ll know I’ve acknowledged you, because if you tell me that you’ve done it, I’ll “like” it. Thanks.

This is a total hoax. I have no idea how unsubscribing from comments and likes will make you less susceptible to hackers. A couple of things will, include using the https: interface to log in to Facebook, changing your password often, and setting your privacy settings on everything to “Friends” rather than “Friends of Friends,” or worse still, “Public.” You can read more about this on the Sophos Blog.

Here’s a little how-to video I made for you that shows you how to change your subscription to your friends’ status updates.

You can also edit your subscriptions to your friends by going to their Facebook profile and clicking on the “Subscribed” button.