Dissecting Facebook Lite

"Facebook is clearly up to something big," said Ben Parr in Mashable. Recently, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and rolled out realtime search. Now the social-networking site has chosen thousands of users to test out Facebook Lite. "What it is exactly ... we’re not quite sure."

"Judging from what we have seen so far," said Frederic Lardinois in ReadWriteWeb, "Facebook Lite turns Facebook into a very Twitter-like experience." Details are scarce, but the plan, Facebook says, is to offer a "faster, simpler version of Facebook," which, along with the FriendFeed purchase, sounds like the recipe for a "full-force attack" on micro-blogging site Twitter. And Facebook has been "getting rather cluttered," so stripping it down to the bare essentials isn't a bad idea at all.

Screenshots of Facebook Lite do "look a lot like Twitter," said MG Siegler of TechCrunch in The Washington Post, "but in reality, Facebook Lite has nothing to do with Twitter or FriendFeed—at least not right now." The real purpose of offering a more streamlined version of the site, according to people at Facebook, is to make it more accessible to people in countries where broadband speeds vary and cost a lot—which explains why much of the early testing has been in India.

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