Yesterday tons of people wrote that my description of Facebook’s new status API as a “Twitter killer” was absolutely ludicrous. They claim that I don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter and how Twitter is much more than just status updates. Trust me, I fully understand the difference between the two services. I would argue that the ability to “follow” people you aren’t connected to and the ability to @ reply (”at reply”) to other users is just a feature.

Since the majority of people think that Nick’s smoking crack for calling Facebook’s new API a “Twitter Killer”, I’ve decided to outline the blueprint of a product that duplicates Twitter’s features yet uses Facebook as a backbone for each of these status updates. I’m going to call this product “FB Tweet” but you can call it whatever you want. I began programming it but decided that I was only putting my existing projects aside and ultimately it’s not worth the time for me personally.

Whoever decided to take the day or two to make this product will be rewarded for taking the time as it will surely generate a ton of buzz.

Is There A Need for “FB Tweet”?

Any good product must satisfy the needs of the user and the first question to ask is if there is a need for a Twitter replacement. I’ve made some fundamental assumptions that suggests there is a need but feel free to argue otherwise. The average user probably wouldn’t switch products because they are fine using products that they’ve spent the time to learn how to use.

I don’t think Twitter users are average though. I think Twitter is still used by mostly early adopters. If Twitter has in fact become mainstream then the odds of a “Twitter Killer” is much less likely. The need for a “twitter-like” product is clear but ultimately I would argue that much of what is provided by Twitter is simply a set of core features that can be easily replicated:

FB Tweet Features

• Public status updates - As one commenter put it yesterday, “FB = inner circle; Twitter = public party”. That’s no longer the case because status updates are now accessible to those outside your inner circle.
• Ability to reply via user aliases - Twitter’s identification system is one of user aliases. This is easy to duplicate in that you simply assign each Facebook user an alias through the FB Tweet product. I would force Facebook users to use their Twitter username (via basic Twitter authentication) or pick a username that hasn’t already been selected on Twitter.
• Open protocol for status update access - One of the most powerful components of Twitter is their open API. Developing an API isn’t very complicated if you are using a good development framework. For example RESTful APIs are native to Ruby on Rails, the development framework which Twitter was built on. Django, a powerful Python framework, also has a great module for building a RESTful APIs. If you want to develop a RESTful API in PHP (which is the language most Facebook developers use) then I recommend checking out this article.
• Unidirectional follow capabilities - This is was sets Twitter apart from Facebook. It’s the ability to follow somebody’s status updates without them confirming. FB Tweet resolves this issue by letting people use their existing Twitter user names but when the status is published in Facebook it will say “@Full Name, text of status update”.
• SMS Functionality - This is where FB Tweet will have some issues initially. While Facebook currently has SMS functionality within their API it’s not documented well and doesn’t work with all mobile phone carriers. If Facebook truly wanted a “Twitter Killer” to exist, they would have to improve their SMS API significantly.

Conclusion

While Facebook’s new status API will bring in a wave of new applications, the death of Twitter still requires the rapid development of a new product that is distributed through Facebook. Not all Facebook users understand why Twitter is so powerful, yet provided with a public timeline of their friends’ statuses, I believe they would rapidly begin to see the value.

Will Twitter disappear tomorrow? Probably not, but there’s a huge opportunity to duplicate the majority of the functionality provided to Twitter users directly to Facebook users. I would argue that this product would make it easier for Facebook users to understand what the power of a twitter-like product provides and help bring such a service to the mainstream.

Twitter clearly has an opportunity here though. They already have many of the features I’ve outlined but they don’t yet have the full Facebook integration that I described. At this point though, I still fervently believe that the status wars are not yet over and a new company could come into power.

Finding out your marriage is over via Facebook may be one of the worst experiences you could have. Yet that’s exactly what happened to Emma Brady, 39, when her husband of 12 years changed his relationship status on Facebook, according to theDaily Mail. To Neil Brady’s friends, the message on their news feeds read “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.”

The worst part about this situation is the fact that Emma says she had no idea her marriage was in such dire straights until a friend saw Neil’s updated relationship status and called her at work to see if she was all right. It’s painful enough to go through marital problems and even a divorce. It can be just as painful to have to deal with the social consequences of divorcing, so Neil’s public denouncement of his marriage via Facebook has turned into a very humiliating situation for Emma.

Neil, however, insists that his Facebook profile changes are not the first Emma had known of their separation. After a scuff between Neil and Emma, the husband grabbed his wife by the wrist and threw her out of the house wearing nothing but her robe after hearing of Emma’s purported affair. The case went to court, where the Facebook status situation also came up. Neil’s attorney insists that Neil had suggested a separation several times, rejecting Emma’s claim that the Facebook status update was the first she’d heard of Neil’s desire to end their marriage.

While this does all seem to boil down to a nasty case of he-says, she-says, the situation merely reiterates the power of Facebook as a heavily influential social utility. Just last weekPrince Harry faced a similarly humiliating situation when his girlfriend of 5 years officially ended their relationship by changing her status on Facebook as well. No matter which way you look at it, changing your relationship status on Facebook is an official and public declaration of what’s going on in your real life.

And with delivery tools like the Facebook news feed, our immediate social graph is only enabled to watch the successes and the train wrecks of our lives go by. As Facebook is a social network, these successes and train wrecks also become interactive occurrences in our lives’ timelines, often incurring reactions from friends and acquaintances we’re just not ready for.

Which begs the question; is this something that will change on Facebook’s end, or an individual’s end (by changing things like privacy settings or merely avoiding online social networks all together) or will we come to accept the fact that our lives get played out and essentially archived on sites like Facebook, for all to see?