The Facebook Status and the Twitter status are fundamentally the same thing. You are telling the world what is on your mind. The like functionality in Facebook is a means of communication - someone clicks like and says I like your opinion on this, your good news, your joke, the fact you are in a good mood.

Now if Twitter has the same status functionality could 'like' not be equally effective?

From a technical point of view they are the same thing, both are short 'status' updates.

However they are used in different ways, by different users for different things. People mostly use twitter as a 'microblog'. It's like a blog, but each 'blog post' is limited to be very small. People use Facebook status updates to tell people what they are doing and to tell their friends things. If I see your facebook updates, you can see mine. Twitter is not like that. Facebook is for socializing, twitter is like newspapers. They are different, ergo it doesn't make sense to make them identical

I don't really agree with you as many of my friends feed their twitter to facebook - I assume there is some kind of app for this. Thus many facebook status updates are actually tweets. So many of the end users see tweets and status updates as the same thing. Facebook just needs to come up with a snappy verb for it.

Yes many of my friends feed their twitter straight to Facebook aswell. It's quite annoying to me. There is a Facebook app to do it. There's another facebook app that will only update your facebook if your tweet contains "#fb", which is a much better way