Following in the footsteps of its social networking bigger brother, Twitter will soon be launching a Facebook Connect-like set of tools that will enable third-party Web sites and services to directly integrate the microblogging site's features, accessible when a user inputs his or her Twitter identity.

The product, which will be based in open standards, will allow for authentication of users and data exchange between Twitter and the third-party sites.

As anyone familiar with the openness of the Twitter API might have guessed, these kinds of interactions have always been possible. However, in providing a set of tools like Facebook Connect, Twitter will be easing the process for publishers.

Since Facebook first revealed it in May 2008, Facebook Connect has matched the ongoing growth of the social site it represents, and has now extended to 80,000 Web sites. Each month, 60 million of Facebook's 350 million worldwide users are taking advantage of the service.

As a testament to the immense utility and benefit that third-party sites see in attracting Facebook users, even MySpace, once itself the king of social networking, has just started enabling Facebook Connect on its Fan Video service.

Starting in the last few months of 2009, Twitter suffered a stark plateau in its growth rate, leading everyone to wonder what the site could or would do to help spur exponential growth of the kind that Twitter experienced in the first half of 2009. Perhaps "Twitter Connect" is just one of a few tricks that the company has up its sleeve for 2010, but nobody can really say at this point how much such a service will help the site grow.