According to Inside Facebook, the blue giant may be working on a native Twitter application as evidenced by engineer Blake Ross’ tweet from an application named “Penguin FB” on Facebook’s development servers. Asks Inside Facebook’s writer Justin Smith, “Is Facebook about to become the largest source of tweets?” The company did not comment on the “Penguin FB” project and Ross has since deleted the “Penguin FB” test tweet. For now, the public is left in the dark as to what all this means.
If Facebook is planning to make a move on a native Twitter application, this could produce ludicrous results on the Twitter landscape. Twitter’s super users already share profound and banal moments of their daily lives on a bi-hourly basis. Imagine the few days before we realize how to change the settings on individual tweets for Facebook friend requests, game scores, causes, event RSVPs, wall posts, new application requests and notes. Marimba ring tones will resonate in boardrooms and offices across the nation.
Meanwhile Facebook has been widely criticized after suing Power.com, a service that allows users to import Facebook friends and posts into other social networking services. Data portability proponents like the Electronic Frontiers Foundation argue that Facebook is making data migration an unnecessarily tedious process for its users. Perhaps a native Twitter app and this possible foray into external push features is exactly what the company needs to further expand on an experience that is too often knocked for being insular.
