Facebook-Twitter integration: mentions and status tags

I use both Facebook and Twitter extensively, and while there have been some big steps in integrating the two platforms for users, there’s room for more. One of the important features of this integration, for me, is that the status messages that go in either direction need to be modified to match the destination platform. Twitter and Facebook are fundamentally different services, and copying a message by a user from one platform to the other should be about more than just the text that was entered.

Some of us who have both Facebook and Twitter accounts have a setup where anything they tweet becomes their Facebook status. Recently I found an interesting app called Selective Twitter status that only takes tweets that are tagged with #fb and sets those as your Facebook status (after removing the #fb tag). This reduces the noise you generate on Facebook when you say/retweet/reply to something on Twitter which your friends on Facebook have no clue about. Twitter, after all, is used for more than just status messages. Having all your tweets as Facebook statuses means your Facebook friends only see one side of the conversation. This app helps solve that by allowing you to select tweets for Facebook and improve your signal-to-noise ratio. It would be great if the service had an option for removing all #tags from the status since they don’t usually mean much to a Facebook user.

The Twitter app on Facebook also recently started adding a “Follow @username” link under statuses from Twitter, which is a good step in integrating the two services.

What I would really like now is to have a way to link Twitter mentions to Facebook status tags. For example, say I have a friend “@alice” on Twitter, who is also “Alice inWon” on Facebook. If I mention her in a tweet which gets to Facebook, she’s still @alice, which means nothing on Facebook. What would be useful, and semantically better, is if the Twitter app could recognise people who are on both Twitter and Facebook, and convert the mentions into status tags as it gets pulled into Facebook.

For example:

Could become:

This would improve the integration between the two services by providing the same information, and linking the mentioned person in the relevant service.

I don’t know if this is possible with the Facebook API, but if it is, I’d love to see it get implemented. If not, I hope that sort of functionality is enabled somehow in the future.

Another idea for this sort of integration is with Twitpic photos. Many times, Twitter users will post a photo on Twitpic and tweet the link to it. This is currently one of the best ways to tweet single photos as they happen. When these tweets get to Facebook they are just a link in a status message. Facebook has its own well developed and well understood photo management system. A nicer integration would be where tweets with a Twitpic link (and other popular photo-tweeting services) could appear on Facebook as a photo wall post. That way, on facebook, users can discuss the photo, like it and tag it.

These are just some of the ways I think Twitter and facebook integration can be continued and improved, for the benefit of users on both platforms.