A new feature from Facebook lets you authorize non friends to "subscribe" to your profile , creating your own personal army of groupies. It's sort of like putting your Facebook into "Twitter" mode, with all the excitement and terror such a combination implies.

You can upload personal pictures to share with family — and share a fun one with the strangers who follow you. You can keep your inner circle up to date on your travel plans — and brag about you most exclusive invite to everyone who might plausibly care. One false move and embarrassing private info will spill over into the public realm, but judging from Facebook's blog announcement of this new feature, the social network starts you off with perfectly sensible defaults: People can only subscribe to your profile once you opt in to the subscription feature, and posts will only get shared with subscribers if you expressly mark them as "Public."

It sounds intriguing. The riskiness inherit in commingling intimate moments with public ones actually makes the new feature kind of exciting. The problem for Facebook is that all the real egomaniacs have already accumulated their followers over on Twitter, leaving Facebook subscriptions as the tool of the merely slightly self obsessed. (This is for narcissism amateurs, in other words. Pfft.)

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