Facebook Cedes Content to Twitter for Facebook Pages, Not Profiles

Facebook Aug. 20 said it is allowing administrators of Facebook Pages to automatically post Facebook updates to Twitter, building a narrow bridge to its microblogging rival.

Facebook Pages are special profiles public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations use as marketing tools, or to just keep their fans abreast of what's going on with them. Soon, these Pages proprietors will be able to share a status update, photo or an event happening with their followers on Twitter, boosting their marketing messaging.

Comedian-actor Dane Cook, LIVESTRONG, The World Wildlife Fund, the NBA, WNBA and D-League are currently using this feature to publish the content on their Facebook Page to Twitter to reach a broader audience.

Mike Gummelt, who built the feature to let Facebook Page admins port content to Twitter as a summer intern from Stanford University, said in a blog post that admins will be able to control the sharing of status updates, links, photos, notes and events. Admins running multiple Pages will be able to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts.

This new feature will soon be available here.

However, this feature only links Facebook Pages to Twitter, not users' individual profiles. This means Facebook will continue to be criticized for its one-way-street approach to Twitter. Users can publish Twitter tweets to Facebook via third-party applications, but can't extend Facebook content to Twitter.

This has been Facebook's Achilles heel; it is willing to let content in, but has been reluctant to let users extend the content they add to Facebook's walled garden to other social sites. Facebook Connect allows users to bring their Facebook profile into the Web, and while the offering has been popular among companies and geeks, individual users are hardly lining up to use it.

Twitter, which lets users post 140-character or fewer messages, is an especially sensitive area because Facebook views it as a threat to its social network.

Twitter's user base is rapidly growing, partially driven by Twitter features geared to keep people on the site longer. For example, Twitter offers real-time search capabilities, helping users find tweets from people they are following. Soon, the company said it will offer location-based services.

To counter Twitter, Facebook recently acquired FriendFeed, which boasts real-time search and other real-time activity streams, and rolled out an improved search service.

Read more about this feature on TechMeme here.