Fans, Followers, Favorites, Subscribers on the Yahoo! Contributor Network

Most social networks have a way you can befriend someone and put them on a list of some sort. While the Yahoo! Contributor Network isn't a social network in the true sense of the word, there are various ways that you can put a fellow contributor on a list to make it easier for you to find and read their work. But what do the terms fan, follower, favorite and subscriber mean?

There's a lot of terminology to learn. If you favorite someone, you become their fan. If you subscribe to someone, you become their follower. To make it more confusing, if you follow/subscribe to someone, you also become their fan, but if you favorite someone you do not become a follower/subscriber.

Did you get all that? Let me try to make it a bit simpler.

If you read articles from a person you'd like to read more from, you might go to their profile and click on add to favorites. That will put the person's avatar on your list of favorites on your profile so that you can find them easier. You will not get any notifications when they publish anything new.

If you'd like to get notifications whenever that person publishes a new article, click on subscribe instead of favorite. You will then get an email notification when an article is published by that person, with a link in the email directly to that article. You won't have to keep visiting their profile.

If you chose favorite, you would have to check that person's profile frequently to see if there were any new articles published recently, and that can be cumbersome as some people may write several articles a day and others might publish one article a week. If you have a particular day of the week or set time of day that you go through your list of favorites, you're going to miss a good number of articles, as well as waste time looking at profiles with no new content.

If you follow/subscribe to a large number of writers on the Yahoo! Contributor Network, you are going to get a lot of email notifications, but there is no obligation to read each article associated with them. Set up your email account to filter all Yahoo! Contributor Network email into a separate folder and it's easy enough to open the emails in that folder as you have time, and click the topics you find interesting and delete those that don't interest you. Even if you don't have time to read the article at that moment, keeping the email in that folder allows you to find it again easily when you have more time, and none of it is cluttering up your regular email inbox.

To sum it up, if you want to view certain writers' profiles here and there by going to their profile, click on add to favorites. If you don't want to miss anything from that writer, click on subscribe and you'll get email notification when they publish.

My preference is to subscribe to someone and get the email notification rather than miss something they've written. It's much easier to delete an email than it is to scroll through a number of favorites in hopes of finding new and interesting content to read.

There, that wasn't as hard as you thought - was it?

Source:
Personal experience