Back in September, when Facebook introduced almost every couple of days on a new feature or update, the company also presented a new Subscribe button. Now, it seems that Facebook is going to expand this feature to websites outside of the social network.

Yesterday at Le Web conference in Paris, One of Facebook’s senior VP’s, Joanna Shields, has announced that the popular social network is going to launch very soon the Subscribe button as an external plugin for websites, so they will be able to offer their users the option to subscribe for their Facebook’s page or profile directly from their sites.

Subscription Option For Pages As Well

Currently, the Subscribe button is only available on personal profiles and not on Facebook pages. If someone wants to receive updates from a page, he needs to “Like” it and even then he won’t receive all updates (or the option to customize the amount). Additionally, it may not reflect what the user truly think about the page (not “Like” it).

The new Subscribe button for publishers that Facebook intend to roll out soon, should remedy these issues as publishers would also gain greater control over their publishing audience after Facebook made sharing changes in August or by using the Lists feature introduced a short while after.

Implications?

The soon-to-be-launched Subscribe button plugin for publishers will be mostly threatening Twitter, that (at the moment) offers the most similar one-click subscription button (“Follow”) and while other social networking services don’t offer yet this kind of social button.

It can also create an overload of social buttons by Facebook specifically and also for the social industry in general: Facebook already has few social plugins (“Like”, “Share”, Box, etc.) just as many other social networks and additional social services that are creating more through time (like the recent Save to Foursquare button).

I don’t know if indeed it will create a social buttons overload, however, what i am pretty sure is that publishers couldn’t ignore the new Facebook Subscribe button (unless you want to ignore 800+ million users) and will have to add it as well.