WOW: Facebook Launches a Twitter App

This is a bit of a shocker. Facebook, who has seemingly been in a race to emulate many of Twitter’s features, just announced that it’s launching the ability for Facebook Page admins to simultaneously update both their Page and Twitter.

Facebook explains how this will work in a blog post:

“If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them.

If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile. It will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter”

While that makes a lot of sense from a convenience standpoint – many big time Twitter users also have popular Facebook Pages and vice versa – it’s surprising to see Facebook so openly acknowledge Twitter’s reach. That said, by giving users the ability to update both services via Facebook, they’re clearly hoping that the Facebook Page will become the first stop for admins.

That would mean lots of “via Facebook” messages showing up in tweets, and in fact, it’s not hard to imagine Facebook quickly becoming one of Twitter’s most popular clients. However, I wouldn’t expect this functionality to be extended to user profiles anytime soon, which would clearly be a bigger win for Twitter than Facebook.

We did suspect that Facebook might be working something along these lines last month when messages “via penguin FB” showed up on Twitter by way of a Facebook engineer. But now, we know the details, and it definitely creates a lot more intrigue in the ongoing Facebook vs Twitter battle.