For quite awhile now, users have been able to get apps for Facebook that automatically copy Twitter posts to their Facebook profiles. Facebook has yet to provide a way to do the opposite.
Until now, that is.
A feature that allows publishing to Twitter from Facebook pages will be released over the next few days, according to a post on the Facebook Blog made yesterday by engineering intern Michael Gummelt. For administrators of Facebook pages, selecting which content to cross-publish—status updates, links, photos, notes, and/or event creations—will be a breeze, and the rest will follow.
Unfortunately, Facebook loses some kudos for not going all the way in allowing users with personal profiles to link those to their Twitter accounts. As it is now, this update will serve only public figures, businesses, and organizations with public presences online. Gummelt lists Dane Cook, The World Wildlife Fund, and the NBA as some good examples already linking their content from Facebook pages to Twitter.
Why doesn’t Facebook shoot for full openness, allowing regular users to connect their updates to Twitter too?
Some speculate that Facebook is worried that such a move would cancel out the site’s advantage over Twitter, in terms of number of users, if everything on Facebook were to be simply copied over to Twitter. Once Facebook really starts encouraging its users to make their updates public, with the aim of making Facebook a real-time search engine like Twitter, this might be a legitimate concern.
On the other hand, openness is always a winning strategy.
Though FriendFeed certainly wasn’t the most popular social network on the Internet, it served up a powerful engine because it focused on the ability to connect with various other networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and many others. Surely this was one reason why Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed was so important.
Even Twitter was wooing FriendFeed, according to a VentureBeat article posted yesterday, and the company’s executives were thinking about shelling out the $50 million in cash and equity for the site.
But, as everyone knows, Facebook made the purchase first. Perhaps the number one order of business for Facebook’s new team from FriendFeed then is to figure out how to open up the site’s 250 million users to other social bookmarking and networking sites, while ensuring the continued dominance and strong user base that the site has maintained for so long now.
