Yesterday I posted about an interesting trick that could be used to view your live feed from within a Firefox sidebar. The trick was pretty useful in that I didn’t have to navigate to Facebook to view my feed anymore. Within a short period of time, Facebook effectively disabled the widget, making the trick a simple short term tool.

The tool illustrated a lot of the potential that I see in the company competing directly with Twitter though. I can understand why Facebook disabled direct access to the widget though. The primary reason being that using the widget within your sidebar removed the impressions to CNN’s site. I don’t think it was a good decision though. CNN would have received more exposure every time someone updated their status.

For the time being, all hope of a twitter-like Facebook status product has been flushed down the drain. I still firmly believe that Facebook has the potential to kill Twitter’s mainstream reach but the window of time for Facebook to strike is rapidly closing. So why won’t Facebook make status updates publicly accessible? Honestly, I have no idea.

There are very few reasons I can come up with. First, Facebook may not want to compete with Twitter. Additionally, they may not have to compete. As long as a large percentage of active Twitter users continue to share their tweets through Facebook, there’s no need for Facebook to make a publicly available status update. Twitter takes care of that for them.

Do you think Facebook could take on Twitter? Would there be any benefit to that?