Facebook Taking Status Updates Public (A La Twitter)

This week, Facebook announced some coming changes to your status updates. Soon, just like with Twitter, you’ll have the option to make them public—but not just to everyone on the world’s most popular social network, but everyone around the world. (You know, with Internet access.)

Because this feature is being implemented on the Facebook Publisher, you can add more to your newsstream than just text updates and links. The buttons below the text area allow you to add photos, videos and announcements or other integrations from your apps that have integrated with the publisher.

Facebook also gave an in-depth explanation of each level of access:

• Everyone: Anyone, on or off, of Facebook can see it.
• Friends and Networks: People you have confirmed as friends and people in any school or work networks that you’ve joined can see it.
• Friends of Friends: Anyone who is friends with a friend of yours can see it.
• Friends: Only people you have confirmed as friends can see it.
• Custom: Choose any friend or Friend List to include or exclude from seeing that piece of content.

According to Inside Facebook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promised more granular privacy controls recently, and this may have been exactly what he meant.

Right now, this feature is being tested with users who have chosen to set their profile and status updates to “Everyone,” but for everyone else, the Publisher settings will remain the same.

What do you think? Will multi-media, real-time updates on a site that already has widespread traction ever take the place of Twitter in your heart (and the media’s)?