Facebook Joins Forces With Twitter
In a move that can only be described as rather familiar, Facebook has announced (rather silently) that their users will soon be able to update their Twitter feeds directly from within their Facebook profile. Remember when MySpace opened its doors to Facebook? This isn't exactly like that, but think about it: acknowledging the fact that a vast amount of Facebook users can't live without their Twitter? That's a pretty big deal. Now we get to see how long it takes for Google to react.
It's not exactly fully a new concept for Facebook to be updating Twitter feeds, and also not the first time the group has officially allowed such a thing to happen. You can use your Facebook page as an RSS feed and link it through any number of third party feed-readers that can then push updates to Twitter. That's quite old. More recently there's been a page update (seen above) that allows you to send updates to a Twitter feed from your Facebook Pages. This is "Pages", I must remind you, separate from your Facebook "Profile" which is yours personally while a Page can represent just about anything or anybody.
Facebook's September 2011 update of its Subscribe for Public Figures document added a little something that Emil Protalinski discovered. There's a number 14 on that page which is titled "Can I update my Twitter followers from Facebook?" which has several numbers after it, the second of which reads:
Link your profile or Page to your Twitter account. Once you link your accounts, your Twitter account will be updated every time you post a public update to Facebook. Note: Only posts whose privacy you set to Public using your inline controls are eligible for this...
And that's all that matters. Since the Page business is already in full working order, we must expect the Profile bit to be coming up rather quick. In the past we've seen several of the aforementioned feed-reading apps being blocked from cross-posting to Twitter, now we're seeing this. What does this say about Facebook's future? Twitter, I think we can safely say, is in a good position at this moment.
Note also that there's a Facebook developer convention on the 22nd of September, this being the one you all know and love, the one called F8 ("fate"). We're expecting this and other news to pop up there as well in earnest. Also check out how Facebook might be launching a music service at this year's F8 as well. Exciting!