Twitteronia is abuzz this morning: Some Twitter messages on the most mundane details of their lives are not getting automatically posted to Facebook, too. It must be censorship or something!

Twitter, while much smaller than Facebook, competes with the social network in encouraging users to post short "status updates," no matter how banal and meaningless. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg loves Twitter. In fact, he loves Twitter so much he tried to marry it. After Twitter rejected a $500 million offer, he set about copying its look. That effort led to a disastrous redesign about which Facebook users (and employees) are still griping.

Hence the conspiracy theories. Facebook has a Twitter app which takes updates from the service and reposts them on users' profiles, and numerous third-party software applications post updates simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter. Some mechanism responsible for the crossposting seems to be broken, however. A tipster writes:

Rumors on Facebook that Facebook intentionally killed its Twitter application late last night, so that Twitter now doesn't show up in anyone's Profile or Home Page. Jealousy? Revenge?

How about human error? The systems behind these simple-looking sites are increasingly complicated, and at Facebook, almost any engineer can release new code to the site in as little as an hour. If Facebook is trying to displace Twitter, then it has every interest in coaxing Twitter users to share their updates on Facebook, too, rather than driving them away. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Update: Actually, Twitter says it's all its fault, maybe! Aw, that's no fun.