When Facebook changed its privacy controls this week a lot of people saw it as an attempt to open up access to their information by changing the default preferences to allow more of your info to be accessible. This would particularly benefit marketers. I think there is something entirely different going on, a strategic change.

With the privacy controls a user can completely change Facebook to serve their own ends. If you only want to use it as a private club for your friends, set limits on everything. If you want it to take on a Twitter-like functionality, open everything up to a public conversation. By giving us these expanded options, Facebook has taken a direct shot at Twitter. Twitter is a public forum. Anyone following you can see your conversations unless you block them individually. This works great as an ongoing stream of news, opinion, links, etc., that can be tracked and searched. With the ability to open our Facebook privacy completely you can duplicate this aspect of Twitter with the broadly expanded capabilities inherent in Facebook: videos, pix, blog posts, links, conversational threads, etc.

For me this means I probably don’t need Twitter at all in the long run. As it stands Twitter is almost useless as a tool without a third party app set up to track certain keywords. Is there any reason I should be using both Twitter and Facebook if Facebook offers everything Twitter does and more?

All Facebook has to do is give me a stream on my page that lets me track keyword usage in all public conversations and I’m done with Twitter.

The Facebook strategy is to own the online communication space- and they are nearly there.