Facebook made two interesting announcements this week, one which a number of pundits claim could signify a play at grabbing some of Twitter's audience, and both of which represent steps away from a closed data silo and towards greater member identity openness. With the announcement that the social networking site will join the OpenID movement, the company adds credence to earlier promises about making its data more openly accessible to third-party developers. A seat on OpenID's board of directors adds financial support to its participation in the open distributed identity movement as well.

The second announcement surrounds Facebook's API, or application programming interface — the system that gives outside developers access to user data on the site in order to build their own applications using that data. The company announced via its developer blog that status updates, links, notes and videos will be now be accessible via the API. Some industry analysts think this is a move towards capturing some of Twitter's mindshare, both because Twitter is essentially a status update app and also because the popularity of the microblogging service is due in part to its generous API that allowed an entire external ecosystem to form around the status updates members were contributing to Twitter. It seems that Facebook is hoping for a similar ecosystem to form around the content its members are contributing to their profile pages, with microblogging-like status updates and other data now available to third parties to play with.

Counterpoints to the argument that Facebook's status update API could kill Twitter include the remaining "closed" nature of friending on Facebook vs. Twitter — to receive someone's updates on Facebook, they have to first approve you as a friend, whereas Twitter has made popular the concept of "followers," wherein opting in to someone's status updates is as simple as subscribing to them, with no reciprocity required. The other key aspect Facebook still holds close to its chest is your social graph data — who you've expressly listed as your friends — and owning that data has to date been a key part of the site's value proposition. Whereas a number of interesting applications to help you analyze your Twitter followers have emerged — among them Twittersheep (here's a tag cloud describing my followers),TwitterCounter, Twinfluence, MyTwitterFlock, Twubble, Twitterholic and others — these kinds of applications would not be possible under Facebook's current API because social graph data is not made available.

There's also the problem of intertia. Once a service becomes a staple of people's daily usage, as Twitter has become for many (myself certainly included!), it's no simple prospect to convince them the grass is greener elsewhere. On the flip side, users are also not shy about switching to services that make themselves more compelling, and Facebook has the advantage of being a service many of those same users already use. Or perhaps, as is becoming more and more the case with web services, it won't come down to some sort of status update jello wrestling match at all and both services will continue to exist and serve happy users in a fluid, distributed and portable identity kind of world we increasingly live in. Considering many of us have already hooked our Twitter updates into Facebook already, the question may turn out to be a bit of a non-starter after all.

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