Facebook decided to boost its campaign efforts against the rest of the social media companies such as MySpace, Yahoo and Hi5 and announced the open-source transformation of some of its platform parts, under the name Facebook Open.

The plan is to offer developers a look at the site’s technological infrastructure, allow them to observe how the code works and manipulate it for the better. Also, developers will be able to present their feedback with suggestions for possible improvements and changes. The site’s officials released several new tools that can be used by programmers to design new and better applications for its users.

“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications,” the company said in a statement, quoted by the New York Times. “We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of.”

Facebook’s release comes at about six months after Google launched its Open Social initiative, a set of useful software tools needed by developers to design applications for a series of social networks, such as Yahoo, AOL and MySpace, which are Facebook’s main competitors.

So far, close to 400,000 developers have worked on more than 24,000 applications for Facebook and as new options and freedoms are offered, many more are expected to follow. For the moment, the company’s open-source platform is not working with any other partner but depending on the market’s needs discussion may begin at any point.

Overall, Facebook Open is considered a good initiative, but efforts will have to continue in order to keep the Web site on a competitive level, if not even send it to a new dimension.