Fans of tennis superstar Maria Sharapova might have noted she used the hashtag #misstheopen in an otherwise mundane tweet last week about seeing "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway.
To get the full story, though, fans had to go to her Facebook Page. There, a day later, she dropped a status update that included a 126-word explanation about her decision to pull out of this year's U.S. Open. The statement, which was also on her official blog, explained that it was a tough decision but "it all comes down to taking the proper amount of time to heal my shoulder injury properly."
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Similarly, comedian Patton Oswalt uses Facebook for essays on topics like whether Ben Affleck will be a good Batman and the Boston Marathon bombings.
Despite the opportunity to offer deeper engagement with fans, though, the news industry largely views Facebook as an also-ran to Twitter when it comes to breaking news. The major reasons: Until now Facebook has lacked a trending topics list and the ability to embed posts. Facebook is now addressing both. In addition, the company is wooing celebrities, many of whom are curious about how best to use the platform. The offshoot may be a subtle redefinition of our relationship with celebrities.
Justin Osofsky, director of platform partnerships and operations at Facebook, compares Facebook's current efforts around celebs to the realization, years ago, that photos would be an important part of the user experience. "We similarly see an opportunity here around public moments," he says "We needed to be investing more on the product front."
One such product, according to AllThingsD, is an app for celebs to "easily monitor Facebook fan chatter about themselves from a mobile device." Osofsky declined to comment about such an app.
Facebook's push goes beyond product, though. The company is building an overall partnership team with people in Los Angeles, Europe and Asia. In L.A., Facebook has five people, including Dustin Brammell, who was formerly a brand manager for celebrities like Paul Walker and Jonathan Hull, and spent many years in the music industry at Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.
Brammell leads music partnerships out of the L.A. office. Kelly Davis, who used to head up digital media for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, is also part of the team, as is Charles Porch, who leads entertainment and celeb partnerships. Nick Grudin, a media industry vet, leads these overall content partnerships. Grudin reports to Osofsky.
One recent fruit of the team's effort was the exclusive launch of Jay-Z's "Holy Grail" video on Facebook last week. Others have included Gisele Bundchen's first baby pic, Channing Tatum and his wife's first baby pic (see below) and Mary Cheney's statement about her sister's views on same-sex marriage.

Such exclusives will go a long way towards training the press and the public to look at the platform as a forum for breaking celeb news. Since recent additions like embedded posts are so new, as of now the press seems to give Twitter the edge in event breaks. On Monday, for instance, when author E.L. James announced the casting of the movie adaption of her book Fifty Shades of Grey, most news organizations cited Twitter and embedded tweets, even though the news was announced simultaneously on Facebook.
Jeff Benjamin, a columnist for Billboard, says he mostly uses Twitter to get news about musicians he is following. For him, Twitter is a better curation source because it lets you divide your news streams into lists.
"Facebook is particularly tricky because it's a News Feed of my friends and the musicians/celebrities I'm following. I keep the News Feed with the 'Top Stories' option because I've just accepted the fact Facebook knows me too well and will give me the news I want towards the top — but that means it's the 'top' news about my friends and musicians/celebrities. Twitter at least lets me break off the accounts into a smaller feed so I can make sure I don't miss any musician/celebrity/media source's posts."
Benjamin says he didn't know that Facebook now has embeddable posts: "Even though it seems like Facebook is just playing catch up with Twitter now (like copying the hyperlinked hashtags) you'll certainly start seeing more Facebook posts embedded on sites, I would say."
While Benjamin's critique is apt for a journalist, it probably doesn't apply for the general public. Members of the press use Twitter like an RSS feed, but the public has shown a limited appetite for consuming their media that way, as evinced by Google's recent abandonment of its RSS Reader app. Polls also show that users go to Facebook less for breaking news than for updates from friends and family. Where does celeb "news" like Sharapova's statement fit in? It appears to be some middle ground between news and personal updates, a fuzzy space in which stars from sport and entertainment are on equal footing with real-life family members and friends.
Yet Facebook isn't content to sow that middle ground. New features like hashtags and a trending topics list will make Facebook a more Twitter-like experience. This, along with Osofsky's efforts to woo celebs, could unleash the power of Facebook's 1.1 billion-strong platform or it could turn off users who were happy to use Facebook to keep in touch with their Aunt Diane. We'll soon see if Facebook users are along for the ride or, as Osofsky says, they're already leading the effort.
Images: Getty/Alberto E. Rodriguez and Facebook