Trumblog

This summer I wrote about how Facebook’s privacy settings could be the real game changer in their challenging Twitter and reversing the role of Facebook aggregating my Tweets to Twitter broadcasting the subset of my Facebook updates.  In that post I gave the following example of how the privacy settings could lead to this happening:

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.

In thinking recently about how I use Twitter and Facebook I realized that I missed the one piece that is critical to making this work.  That piece is third party apps.

While the majority of status updates on Facebook are made on Facebook.com, that is not true for Twitter. The majority of Twitter users use third party applications, as opposed to Twitter.com, to tweet.  Some use the Tweetdeck website, iPhone users seem to like Tweetie, I use UberTwitter on my BlackBerry, there are tons of other applications at oneforty. For people to switch from Twitter to Facebook as the source of status updates robust applications will be needed and most importantly they will need the privacy setting feature built into the application and easily used and accessible.  It’s a key requirement in order for Facebook to become the source of status updates and rule social media.

Brief aside: Facebook announced the addition of status update privacy settings in June.  So far I haven’t seen anything.  Thoughts around how to take advantage of this feature may be moot.

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