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While Facebook has been inching closer to Twitter-like functionality for awhile I see the publishing privacy change that they are rolling out in the next few weeks as the first real run at assuming Twitter’s position in the online attention marketplace.

So far Facebook’s functionality changes to publishing; the addition of the News Feed, more general sharing options, and real time feed updates all brought Facebook’s functionality closer to what Twitter got us used to and enjoyed, but certainly didn’t replace Twitter.  The limiting factor to that was Facebook’s privacy policy.  Facebook was a closed set of relationships, while Twitter allowed you to broadcast to the greater web. That was the key differentiator, but now it is changing.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what’s I am referring to.  Up to this point Facebook’s privacy filters were applied very broadly. You set up your privacy filters to allow one group of people (large or small) to see some subset of your personal data, your status and links, your wall posts, etc. , but privacy was set within those broad categories.   You couldn’t share one wall post with one group and different one with a different group.  The same people who would read about your excitement over the arrival of a new niece would also read about your excitement over the latest jQuery implementation, which was usually fine, but a limitation that kept Facebook updates and Twitter on the same footing in that regard.

With Facebook’s new privacy settings for the publisher you can now be more specific about who you share your published items with.  Share general news with everyone, share your personal information with friends only and share with specific groups things that only apply to them.  Targeting this privacy setting will be as easy as clicking a button in the publisher. I feel that the ability to customize may be the game changer for whether people aggregate information from Facebook rather than to Facebook as we have done in the past.

I joined Twitter first and Facebook later and for all that time I have used Twitter as my default microblogging platform, importing my Tweets into Facebook.  Twitter is the platform that I use to share news, promote business, meet new people and I keep Facebook as the location for established friends and family where I share more private information.  For this reason I don’t export by Facebook updates to Twitter, but I do import my Tweets to Facebook

The new privacy functionality may upend that process for me.  With the new privacy controls from Facebook I can share the fencing exploits of my daughter to just the family and friends who really care, then, with the same tool, rave about a new restaurant, mark the sharing privacy “everyone,” and share that with the entire internet when  it appears on my public page.  My hope is that status updates to “everyone” will also be available as an RSS feed that I can then send to Twitter therefore exploiting that medium’s broadcasting abilities.  And thus Facebook becomes the handiest of the Twitter publishing programs and the microblogging platform of choice.  The aggregator becomes the source and the source the aggregator.

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