According to a Sunday report in the Wall Street Journal, streams of data will soon flow quite freely at the Facebook social networking site. Reports say that, at the Monday's developer event, Facebook intends announcing the opening up of its user-contributed information to third-party developers.

As a result of the noteworthy change proposed by Facebook, developers would get the opportunity to build applications and services that - with the permission of the users
- would have access to user photos, videos, notes, and comments. The new free feature would provide the developers with an easy access to users' data as well as their privacy settings; and using parts of this data, the developers can even build their own sites and services.

The new move seemingly falls well in line with Facebook's February-launched continuation of APIs - application programming interfaces - whereby the developers got an access to content and methods for sharing in Facebook apps, like Status, Links, Notes, and Video.

In case Facebook does actually put the planned move in practice and support open standards for the transporting data, the 200-million users' strong social networking site could definitely cause a big dent in the momentum gathered by its smaller rivals, like Twitter. After all, with its vast number of users, Facebook obviously has a much wider access to users' data than its rivals.