I asked a more detailed version of this question to Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter yesterday morning at the Conversational Marketing Summit (of course, folks also tweeted it all):
@ev I follow Twitter more than FB, some see Tweets only as FB updates. Would be cool if status was write once, read everywhere.
Part of his answer is that there is a technical limitation. Facebook’s API doesn’t currently allow you to get Status out, only to put it in. So it’d be up to Facebook to allow it.
But also, people use status differently on different services.
In fact, someone followed up asking if they couldn’t have an option for some tweets to update their Facebook status and others to leave it alone. @ev indicated that the simplicity of the single text box with few options is a key feature of Twitter that they are reluctant to tinker with.
Why would it be important to selectively update status to different services?
Facebook status updates are conventionally broadcast-only and not updated too frequently. However, folks often comment on status on the poster’s Wall where a public conversation may take place.
Twitter status updates are often broadcast-only and appropriate to update your Facebook status. Other times, they are conversational (a series of @replies), or otherwise too frequent to fit the Facebook convention for status updates. While you might expect to keep up with all your friend’s FB status updates, you are likely to miss things in your Twitter stream — there isn’t yet a good solution to the filtering or prioritizing problem.
This morning I’m off to visit Xumii.com CEO Jennifer Zanich in San Mateo. (I was introduced to her via a connection on Twitter). I wasn’t thinking about it during the Twitter/FB conversation yesterday, but Xumii’s mobile application looks like it may provide a great solution to the problem as they continue development (assuming they add Twitter to their growing list of supported services).
Xumii looks at status and IM aggregation as a problem to be solved in a good mobile client. They allow flexibility to selectively update status to only certain services as well as to create groups as one way to filter how you view status of those you follow. I’m looking forward to it!
[For fun, here’s a few tweets about this, in case you were wondering what it looks like when people are tweeting and interacting in real life at the same time…]
dalellarson is looking forward to @johnbattelle ‘s first question for @ev “what is your business model?” at Conversational Media Summit today. #CMSummit about 3 hours ago from web
miconian @dalellarson just started following me on twitter and then asked @ev a question five feet from me a few minutes later. We’ve never met.Cool.
Dale Larson 
Cool post. A service would be cool which let you decide where your status get updated and not. Just as an example I update my twitter status all the time. However my facebook status I’ve never updated once as its a totally different crowd.
Cool post. A service would be cool which let you decide where your status get updated and not. Just as an example I update my twitter status all the time. However my facebook status I’ve never updated once as its a totally different crowd.
I use http://www.ping.fm to selectively update various sets of services with one message. It updates a very wide range of services from one platform.You can use its default categories of ‘statuses, microblogs, blogs, all’, update just one of your services, or make your own groups of subsets of services and update only those. It uses the ‘@’ char as the label, so “@freq’ might be the group of services i want to update frequently, for instance.Ping.fm supports image attachments and stores them on ping.fm not on a 3rd party service like Twitpics.You can update ping.fm via your mobile from a WAP version – m.ping.fm and there’s an iPhone-optimised version at i.ping.fm. You can ping via email or ping from all the common IM services.My only disappointment with ping.fm is it’s one way – it doesn’t try to be your one-stop shop for messaging, only your outbound service.Disclaimer: I’ve done some work recently for Xumii, so I won’t comment on the product other than to say I think their idea of a ‘mobile social addressbook’ is a very powerful one, and the first company to let me bring together all my real-world and online contacts on my mobile and lets me message two-way with all or a subset of them as if they were on one network, wins hands-down.
I use http://www.ping.fm to selectively update various sets of services with one message. It updates a very wide range of services from one platform.You can use its default categories of ‘statuses, microblogs, blogs, all’, update just one of your services, or make your own groups of subsets of services and update only those. It uses the ‘@’ char as the label, so “@freq’ might be the group of services i want to update frequently, for instance.Ping.fm supports image attachments and stores them on ping.fm not on a 3rd party service like Twitpics.You can update ping.fm via your mobile from a WAP version – m.ping.fm and there’s an iPhone-optimised version at i.ping.fm. You can ping via email or ping from all the common IM services.My only disappointment with ping.fm is it’s one way – it doesn’t try to be your one-stop shop for messaging, only your outbound service.Disclaimer: I’ve done some work recently for Xumii, so I won’t comment on the product other than to say I think their idea of a ‘mobile social addressbook’ is a very powerful one, and the first company to let me bring together all my real-world and online contacts on my mobile and lets me message two-way with all or a subset of them as if they were on one network, wins hands-down.
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