Everyone’s buzzing today about Facebook’s plans to open up to third party applications. My first reaction — Finally!

With this change, it is expected that outside parties will (pending the approval of users) have access to the pool of user-provided information streams. In other words, stuff like Status Updates, Wall Posts and uploaded pictures will be able to take on a new life outside of the confines of Facebook.com on 3rd party applications.

While many consider this move be very significant for Facebook (a platform long reliant on the “walled-garden” approach), this strategy actually isn’t all that groundbreaking. Twitter, the exploding micro-blogging service boasting 19 million users, has long allowed developers to build off of their service. What Twitter.com lacked in design and user-experience, services like Seismic and Tweedeck provided. In my mind, there’s no doubt that these third party services helped to keep news of Twitter buzzing and ultimately propelled the service into mainstream American consciousness.

So, now that Facebook is letting the third party begin, what’s next?

Well, we can probably expect many of the popular Twitter clients to start aggressively integrating Facebook information and mixing Facebook feeds with Twitter feeds. Along with that,  there will probably be a new legion of services enabling people to interact with Facebook content outside of Facebook.com. And, last but not least, Internet developers will no doubt purchase 3 times as much coffee in the next week as they pull all nighters to develop a new third-party Facebook application that will make them millionaires.

It’s safe to say that Facebook has recently been through quite an identity shift, a shift rivaling the image overhaul of a college sophomore. This most recent move towards open-source information is just one more in a long list of recent changes making the service more Twitteresque.  Just last week, Facebook mirrored Twitter by launching Status Text Updates and, prior to that, the new Facebook homepage redesign brought them to the front line of real-time micro-publishing.

All of this aggressive shifting by Facebook begs one question — is this a smart strategy? Is aggressive shape-shifting an optimal long-term Internet strategy for social networks? I think the answer is YES.

The Internet industry is very much “its own beast.” How often do you find yourself listening to a classically trained business executive describing Internet strategy and think to yourself “um, this incredibly intelligent person simply does not know what he or she is talking about.” In contrast to what some traditional business experts posit, I don’t think “sticking to your core business and what you do well,” is a mantra that applies to this situation.

The Internet Industry moves less like hardware and more like fashion. The online landscape is unpredictable, ever-changing and consumer behavior is strongly guided by a sense of “what’s hip.” While certain brands and platforms become “hip,” it’s also true that certain behaviors and user-activities become “the hot thing” overnight.  These behaviors and activities don’t have a copyright.

In an industry which moves like this with a product as flexible and nimble as online platforms, Facebook’s strategy is the best long-term way to stay ahead of the pack. A cleverly shape-shifting Facebook will be a tough industry-leader to catch. The service already has the significant competitive advantage of pre-assembled user social graphs. If they can keep successfully integrating the popular fashions of Internet behavior into their platform (or off of their platform!), they might just “stick around,” avoiding going the way of Friendster, AOL, Geocities and now even Myspace.