Facebook is holding a press conference Stateside later today, and the big news the social network is expected to announce is that you’ll soon be able to turn your status updates public, so every poking, virtual Frisbee throwing chap and chapette on the site can get your two cents, all the time. Just like Twitter, wouldn’t you say?
Facebook is already testing public updates in a limited beta trial, but an email setting on the Facebook options page offering notifications when someone connects as a fan is a strong hint that the feature is about to roll out across the site’s 200million and counting users.
A public update option should come as no surprise to long time users. Facebook’s publisher bar was quite clearly an attempt to emulate the popularity and buzz of Twitter’s 140 character tweeting system, but only being able to send your links of cats playing pianos to your friends rather than world has stopped it from being a complete carbon copy. Facebook public updates could make the service a true rival to Twitter, only with plenty of other services to go with it.
The only question is, can Facebook’s huge user base – which came to the site initially because of its strong privacy settings – compared to Twitter help it twiumph? Only time will tell.
