Joanna Shields, VP and Managing Director for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has announced that the company would soon launch a subscribe button for websites.

The idea is to let people follow their favorite authors and other personalities right from their websites and blogs. Currently Facebook offers the subscribe button as an opt-in feature on user profiles.

This would be similar to how you can follow Twitter accounts from third party sites. Facebook currently allows you to Like a Facebook Page from third party sites.

Subscribe option on third party sites is going to massively boost the usage of this feature and would turn Facebook into a solid alternative to Twitter for a lot of folks who use both the service.

Remains to be seen how soon Facebook launches it for the general public and how successful this program becomes.