As it's ranting season on Facebook
Facebook have recently added a bunch of new features. They've implemented 'friends lists' (also known as the 'circles' feature on Google Plus) and re-vamped the news feed again. That's not what I want to rant about.
In their ongoing quest to become more like their superior cousin, Twitter, Facebook have created (sorry - stolen) the ability to add people without being friends with them. I've always maintained that Twitter's success is due to the fact that you can add people without the add having to be reciprocal, thus not creating this illusion of friendship that exists on Facebook (and Livejournal before it). You can follow strangers, celebrities and friends alike, and they can choose whether or not they're interested in what you have to say. Facebook have now got something similar in the subscription idea - instead of being friends with someone you can subscribe to them. They don't have to do anything, but anything that they post (publically) will show up in your feed, just like Twitter. Presumably it's to entice the hordes of celebrities who are happy to post on Twitter but are aware of becoming 'friends' with random fans they've never met. That's also not what I want to rant about.
What I do want to rant about is that icon. It's the RSS icon. When I click a link on the web that has that icon next to it, I expect my browser to add it to my feed reader. Not so on Facebook, it simply adds their posts to your Facebook news feed, and increases their subscriber count by one, no RSS in sight. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if it posted something in their news feed saying "Ash is now subscribed to you!" That's not supposed to happen when you click a link that has that icon.
What's even more annoying is that the one place on Facebook from where you still can get an RSS feed now doesn't have the icon, whereas it previously did. Go to your friends' notes page and look at the bottom of the left hand column where it says "Friends' notes"... that's an RSS feed, and until Facebook introduced their subscription feature it had an RSS logo next to it indicating as such. The logo is now gone. Talk about intentionally misleading.
The sad thing is that RSS is an open standard - nobody really controls or owns it. So if Facebook really have intentionally stolen the logo on purpose then there's not really anything anyone can do about it. Hopefully the RSS logo and standard are widespread enough that Facebook will realise it's confusing people and come up with their own icon for subscriptions.