Facebook lets brands export status updates to Twitter

LONDON - Facebook is allowing companies and celebrities to export updates to their Twitter feeds -- a "privileged" feature which has already been taken up by Lance Armstrong's Livestrong and the World Wildlife Fund.

Owners of Facebook Pages, such as public figures, musicians or brands can now publish their Facebook status updates, photos or events on their Twitter page.

The feature is not available to Facebook's general population of 250m.

Brands can control what type of updates to share with Twitter followers, including status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them.

Owners of multiple Pages have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts.

Michael Gummelt, an intern developer who created and announced the feature, said in the company blog: "Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely."

Facebook did not say if the feature would be rolled out to the rest of its members anytime soon.

If it does, the move could potentially make Facebook one of the largest sources of updates on Twitter, and Twitter would become a huge driver of traffic to Facebook, with millions of links, photos and videos all hosted by Facebook, instead of Twitter's URL shortener Bit.ly.

Since Twitter rebuffed Facebook's acquisition offer earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg's company has continually modelled itself around the microblogging website.

Besides modifying many features to take after , Facebook's recent acquisition of FriendFeed, which brought many Twitter features in-house, and the launch of its real-time search platform indicate the company is keen on burying Twitter once and for all.

The company recently announced that it would be rolling out a "Lite" version of its website in order to expand its remit to the far corners of the earth, where internet speeds cannot handle its regular, bandwidth-heavy homepage.

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