I enjoy everything (well, nearly) about Twitter. It is my preferred social media tool. Facebook, however, boasts a much more robust networking environment which I consider to be quite valuable. I like keeping up with old and new friends, learning more about the people I know, reconnecting with more distant family members and so forth. I have for awhile been integrating my Twitter and Facebook status updates by configuring my Twitter client to automatically post tweets to Facebook as status updates. As far as I’m concerned this works wonderfully.

Problem:  Despite my enjoyment of Twitter, my friends on Facebook tend to prefer Facebook to Twitter, so unless I am exceedingly intentional about trawling Facebook I miss a lot of what is happening there. Facebook and Twitter are often grouped in the same networking genre (rightly so, I believe), but they are also extremely unique rather than redundant social networking tools. I think pitting them against one another is a pointless exercise. It seems there are good ways to automatically post from Twitter to Facebook, but how can we close the loop in the other direction?

Proposed solution:  A framework that would close the loop on communications by automatically creating a Twitter account (or using an existing one) for every Facebook user. By default, all Facebook friends would become followers on Twitter. All Facebook status updates could then be pushed to Twitter as well.

Discussion:  (please post your thoughts as comments, but here’s a primer…) Privacy could be further compromised for some users who intend only their Facebook friends to see their status updates. However, Facebook is already trying to make status updates highly public, even if users don’t realize it. Could the proposed framework create “protected” Twitter accounts by default, so there are essentially smaller, limited access networks sharing posts on Twitter via Facebook, or would this lead to other problems?

In addition to that, they responded favourably regarding a feature suggestion and it turns out something like it is already in the works… though it is top secret at the moment. I have some guesses about what the new functionality might be, but even if I’m only partly right, I’m excited about ID’s future and how the blogosphere could become an even better place to be with their help.