Facebook users will soon gain the ability to publish content so that everyone on the web can view it. This will lead a big change for Facebook users, many of whom have been limited to sharing content only with others on Facebook.

The social network has invited its beta testers to experiment with a new version of the site’s Publisher feature, the web-based tool Facebookers use to post status updates, photos and videos to their profiles.

This latest development, announced Wednesday, is only available to beta testers who have made their Facebook profiles visible publicly to everyone, not just Facebook users. The features will be made available soon to other users, the company says. This development also falls in line with Facebook’s support for Activity Streams, the emerging standard for organizing and adding structure to these streams of updates, photos, videos and comments.

The new Publisher contains some added privacy controls, enabling uesrs to push out posts to just their Facebook friends or everyone, on or off Facebook.

Interestingly, the default setting is “Everyone” — showing Facebook is offering some gentle encouragement to its users to share their posts with the whole internet.

Wired.com writer Ryan Singel points out the significance of this on Epicenter:

Clearly the intent is to convince users to publish to the world, since the default is set to “Everyone” — which means the entire internet — with the choice to narrow to “Friends,” “Friends of Friends,” “networks,” or select users when more privacy is wanted. It’s plainly an attempt to gather some of the energy and publicness of Twitter for Facebook, which has largely shied away from exposing its members’ activities outside its online walls.

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Facebook also tipped its hat to Twitter three months ago with changes that added focus to real-time status updates and a change to the status question, which became: “What’s on your mind?” Twitter’s pre-existing equivalent is “What are you doing?”

We here at Webmonkey (and Epicenter) have been arguing for some time that Facebook should open up its network to allow the publishing of content outside its walls. The company has always balked at such a strategy, saying such a move would violate the trust of its users who have come to expect the strictest of privacy controls.

However, it seems Facebook may have found a way to open up the publishing ability while keeping those much-valued privacy controls intact.

Photo: Flickr/Andrew Feinberg

See Also:

• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps
• Facebook Announces Support for OpenID Logins
• Why Facebook Shut Down the Only Useful App it Ever Had

TwitCaps is extraordinary. The newly launched website displays the most recent photos posted to Twitter via the various photo-sharing sites tied in to the microblogging platform.

The TwitCaps frontdoor is captivating. Every tweeted photo, from the mundane to the extraordinary, is lined up in reverse-chronological order. You can hover over each picture and see the original tweet, but that kind of kills the fun. It’s more interesting to look at the photos completely out of context and just soak up the various juxtapositions.

The site tells me two very important things about Twitter. First, users are spread out over the world more completely than I previously thought. And, second, by flipping over to the most popular page, I now realize that Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift are completely owning Twitter.

Bonus: Hackable URLs.

In what was billed as a “small settings change,” Twitter updated its default behavior for displaying @replies Tuesday. Many users feel this change neuters the service, removing one of the most significant ways of discovering new people and finding new conversations.

As expected, the internet burst into flames upon hearing the news, with atavistic outrage quickly spreading far and wide. By early Wednesday morning, the hashtag #fixreplies was the hottest trend on Twitter.

Here’s the official explanation from Twitter’s blog:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

This means that even if you’re following somebody, you won’t see everything they post. You’ll still see the tweets where they don’t add another user’s name, and the tweets where they reply to you or to somebody else you’re following. What you won’t see is any tweet they send in reply to somebody you’re not following.

If you follow me, but not @sally, you won’t see this tweet:

@sally OMG i totally agree!

It’s important to distinguish a reply from a mention. The above example is a reply. Mentions (including retweets) will still show up, so you’ll see this tweet:

Heading to lunch with @sally

Twitter refers to those disjointed replies as “fragmented conversations.” Ever since 2007, Twitter has given its users the ability to see all @replies, regardless of who they’re addressed to, or to filter them out. Now, the option to see all of them has been removed because Twitter feels they clutter up the flow of information on the service.

The more tech-savvy Twitterati disagree. Read Write Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick calls the one-sided replies “serendipitous social discovery.” Web designer Jason Kottke calls them “the magic.”

The voices of dissent have a very good point — Part of the value I gain from following somebody is the ability to study who they’re following. By listening in on the conversations you’re having with the people who influence and inspire you, I gain the opportunity to be influenced and inspired by them as well.

So, why the change now? Blogger Dave Winer’s theory is the celebs who have flooded Twitter recently were being overwhelmed by @replies from people they don’t know, or care to know. Just as likely, new users grew irritated having to read messages from their friends sent to celebs they don’t care about.

Either way, all Twitter did was remove a setting that’s been there for over a year because, it says, the option was too “confusing.” To correct this error, all Twitter needs to do is add the option back in and change the default state. Which is really what it should have done in the first place.

One of the great things about Twitter is that it’s totally open. You can use it however you want — as a breaking news channel, as a way to chat with your friends, as a way to follow celebrities or (and you’ll burn in hell for this) as a new method of spamming people. Twitter has tools in place to filter out any activities that clutter up whatever use case you’ve outlined for yourself.

So please, Twitter, let us choose our own filters. Then we can all go back to eavesdropping on the semi-public conversations our friends are having with the cool and interesting people we haven’t yet met.

We’ll likely see the replies settings go back to the way they were before long, possibly as early as Wednesday. Before co-founder Evan Williams went to bed Tuesday night, he tweeted that his team was “considering alternatives.”

Update: Twitter did change the @reply system, but it’s not a substantial change, nor does it reverse the controversial change made on Tuesday. From the Twitter blog:

…We’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Considering most people reply to tweets by clicking on the reply button, those tweets will continue to remain invisible. Therefore, most of the tweets between your friends and the people they follow will continue to be omitted from your stream. The assumption is this will hold true for the reply buttons in the various external clients, as well.

The rest of Twitter’s response goes on to describe “a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow.” Stay tuned for that one, the team says it’ll take a while.

Image: Columbia Records

See Also:

• When it Comes to Friends, Flickr’s Had it Right All Along
• New Twitter Tools Rival Ease of Facebook Connect
• Flickr Homepage Update Exposes ‘Hidden’ Social Features