Facebook goes public, kills Twitter?

Facebook announced recently that they’re opening up public access to their users’ status feeds – meaning that users and applications outside of the Facebook walled garden can ‘follow’ a Facebook user’s updates. A bit like Twitter, you might think – and you’d be mostly right.

But as Mike Butcher points out on Techcrunch, there are a number of good reasons why it won’t work the same way.  Facebook is still an inherently closed platform, even though they’ve opened a small window. Twitter is inherently public, and thrives on users reading non-private directed communication between others. Facebook’s a long way from delivering that.