Its been interesting to read reactions around the blogosphere on facebook’s announcement of their adding usernames and the inevitable land grab that will begin tomorrow night when the system goes live.

Chris Messina thinks its all about facebook trying to own your digital identity, and he has an interesting post along those lines over on his blog.

Anil Dash has a comic take on things. His timeline of events stemming from the facbook identity launch ends in OCtober of 2010 when AOL decides to add a usernames project to their AIM and Bebo 18-month roadmap.

My take is a little different:

It’s about getting you PUBLIC:

My personal take after having spent the last year working on a communications product is that the username announcement is really less about owning your identity and much more about finding a way to get your facebook status updates public in order to compete with twitter.

Twitter is public by default and that is what makes it such a powerful system. There are no barriers to information moving from one user to another. If anyone in the system has anything important to say (like for example if you happened to see a terrorist in a hotel in mumbai, then that information spreads throughout the system in no time.

That is what makes twitter such a powerful system for transmitting news and information and it’s what has set off so much discussion about the real-time web.

The problem for facebook at the moment is that a very strong expectation has been set that information posted there is only available to your friends, and not to anyone in the public.  Facebook first added public posts back in March, and then opened them up for celebs and public profiles last month. By most accounts the response was muted at best and posting frequency has declines in places where posts are public.  This must be scary for facebook.

By making a big announcement about a new public facing feature and forcing user’s attention over to what their public facing page should be is a great way of shifting expectations slightly towards accepting a public stream of information from you coming out of facebook.

I would bet that within a few weeks of the push, you will be able to publish status items to your public page and within a month or two updates will be public by default.