This week Facebook will reportedly be rolling out the ability to send status updates to Twitter directly from the publisher box. There are apps that cater to the cross-posting of updates between the two social networks, but this would mark the first time Facebook itself actually encouraged it.

The move is an interesting one, considering that Facebook has spent much of its time making itself more Twitter-like. Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook has a good piece chronicling the company's "Twitterfication" over the past year, which includes events like opening the Status API, letting users subscribe to their friends and Pages and receive status updates via text message, releasing @replies-style tagging, and encouraging users to make status updates public. O'Neill says the only step left is to open a search API. Of course Facebook has also just released its own URL shortener.

Facebook employees are already testing the Facebook-to-Twitter functionality:

The feature will utilize the new Facebook URL Shortener, which could actually lead to more widespread awareness of it. Once Twitter is flooded with Facebook links, people may start gravitating to that to shorten their own URLs, although the service at FB.me is not live for everyone to use yet.

Either way, things are really starting to heat up in the URL-shortener space. Not only does Facebook now have its own, but so does Google. On top of that, Twitter-favorite Bit.ly has just launched Bit.ly Pro.

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