• TechCrunch, Tuesday, September 21, 2010 11:51 AM

Don't look now, Fourquare, but Facebook just rolled-out what TechCrunch is calling a "de-facto follow feature." As Inside Facebook originally reported, the top social network just changed the way users can "reject" friend requests. Rather than ignoring (or denying) a request, users can now respond with a "Not Now" reply.

More to the point, TechCrunch notes, "When someone requests to be your friend on Facebook, this automatically subscribes them to all of your public ('Everyone') posts in their News Feed ... You see these posts until this person rejects you (because obviously if they accept you as a friend, you'll keep seeing them)." Adds TechCrunch: "It's almost as if they're saying 'as long as you don't want to block this person, why not let them follow you?'" All of the information seen by "followers" is information that is already public, and any random person could visit another person's profile page to view this exact information. Still, "It's interesting that for pending friends (which again, will now be a ton of people), Facebook starts pumping this info into people's News Feeds."

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