Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported that users will soon be able to post to Twitter directly from their Facebook profiles later on this week. The service, which will use Facebook’s new fb.me short URL, will post public status updates directly to Twitter. The functionality of the service is not yet clear, however the timing is interesting considering that last week the company began encouraging all active users to make their status updates and other content more public.

The URLs from status updates will then link back directly to the user’s profile, in turn generating more traffic for Facebook. It’s somewhat surprising to see Facebook take this action, given that Facebook competes with Twitter in some regards, particularly public status search. With Facebook increasingly opening their “walled garden”, it makes some sense to let users post directly to Twitter.

With close to 100 million users now theoretically publishing public status updates, one has to wonder if the new change will end up crashing Twitter’s servers, which are already known for occasional downtime. Having millions of new status updates in a short period of time could most definitely overwhelm Twitter. This new functionality is similar to a service FriendFeed previously provided though through the ff.im short URL.

With the FriendFeed team now working at Facebook, there’s a good chance that Facebook knows what the impact of publishing to Twitter will be: an increase in PageViews. This new feature most definitely forces even the brightest Facebook analysts to question the company’s motivation though. For now we’ll have wait and see how this product is rolled out, and we only need to wait a couple days at most if the TechCrunch report is accurate.