The long awaited Facebook to Twitter feature – done wrong

So it seems that Facebook has finally caught on to the fact that people want to be able to post their Facebook updates to Twitter automatically as they are going to be enabling that feature over the next few days.

All excited now?

Then you might as well calm down because this is once more a case of Facebook’s misdirection about being open. You see this publish to Twitter will only work for Facebook Pages which means people like Coca-cola, or some celebrity charity page, or some politician trying to con you into voting for them, are the only ones that will be posting to Twitter.

What it doesn’t mean is you being able to post your Facebook updates made on your profile page to Twitter. So they have turned on a feature that will be sure to give all the PR and marketing type a great big woodie but for the rest of you with just a profile page – well you can forget about it.

The blurb from the Facebook blog written by summer intern Michael Gummelt, who coded this feature, goes something like this

Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible. We agree. Over the next few days, we will be releasing a feature that allows administrators of Facebook Pages to publish their Facebook updates to their Twitter accounts automatically. This will only link Facebook Pages to Twitter, not your individual profile.

I hate to tell you Michael but the people who wanted this to work are not the same people who you coded this for. The people who wanted this feature are people who want to be able to post to their Facebook profile feed and have it show up on Twitter. It’s great that you’ve kissed celeb, politician and corporate butt however once more Facebook shows they couldn’t careless about what the “users” want.

Way to go and … thanks for nothing.