Twitter’s exploding growth is in large part due to its relatively open functionality that allows third parties to build services on top of its site – and Facebook is now poised to follow suit.

Within the next 24 hours the company is about to announce that it will allow third party developers to build applications that will access your status updates, photos, videos, comments and notes from the news feed, with your permission.

However, developers have already had access to this information for months, so this implies there will be additional functionality available.

Facebook will also make its data available from an open technology standard that other sites can use, further enhancing its appeal.

Up until now Facebook has been a textbook example of a ‘walled garden’, where outside applications were verboten in a bid to keep web traffic on the site for longer.

The company clearly hopes the move will lead to the type of innovation and buzz that currently surrounds Twitter and the iPhone – in large part due to their developer community.

It will be free for developers to create applications for the social networking behemoth, (200 million users worldwide and counting) and Facebook hopes that it “will build user loyalty and get people to engage more often with the site”, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The plans continue Facebook’s push to become more of a service and less of a destination, in the vein of Twitter and FriendFeed.