You can now update your Facebook status via Twitter.

After the launch of an official Twitter application on Facebook, observations on several blogs noting the similarity between Twitter updates and Facebook statuses, and even a quickly-silenced hack for integrating the two services, blognation Japan reports that the much-anticipated integration of the two platforms has begun.

Previously, you could update your Twitter through Facebook; now the communication goes in both directions.

Facebook has also taken steps to solve the problem of Twitter updates flooding the already-crowded News Feed on its homepages:

Please be aware if you Twitter often, the updates are NOT automatic. The Twitter app in Facebook updates approximately every 30 minutes or so which means if you Twitter often, every update may not immediately appear right away.

Note: I think it does update both Twitter and Facebook status immediately if you post your update via the Twitter FB app itself, instead of Twitterrific or the like.

It appears that the only way to disable this new feature, once you've enabled it, is to go to the Facebook application settings page, edit your settings for Twitter, and uncheck the box that says "Status Updates: Application may update my status without notifying me." To re-enable it, you have to go back to the Twitter app itself.

Also, this does not solve the problem of updates that would be nonsensical outside of Twitter (e.g. direct messages to your Twitter friends).

Definitely a work-in-progress, but updates that fit within the vanilla "status update" paradigm will work well.

For example, my latest update — "Going to Hard Times Cafe for chili and to meet some local entrepreneurs." — fits seamlessly into both Facebook's "Joe is ..." and Twitter's "What are you doing?" contexts.