

Facebook Lite Launches - ashishk
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/breaking-facebook-lite-launches-in-the-u-s/

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Pistos2
"Of course, if you like applications on Facebook, you won’t like this version,
as they are nowhere to be found." SOLD! Can't wait to get this in Canada. I
really hate all the apps, games, quizzes, virtual gifts, etc. I just want to
keep in touch with my friends.

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crabl
Works for me... just go to lite.facebook.com

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Pistos2
I can go to lite.facebook.com only if I'm not logged in. If I go to lite.FB.C
and try to log in, it just redirects me to normal facebook.com.

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unalone
Beautiful! This gets rid of the one Facebook feature I didn't like, and it's
pretty to boot.

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rokhayakebe
One? More like 20+.

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unalone
I Greasemonkey'd almost everything away from Facebook as-is. The one thing I
didn't like was the right column, which is gone now.

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ashishk
as opposed to the general view, i think the new ui is an attempt to compete w/
twitter's ui

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unalone
Get it out of your head that Facebook is competing with Twitter. Facebook is
enormous compared to Twitter, and it and Twitter overlap on only a small
subset of features.

Fact is, right now Facebook doesn't have to compete with anybody. In what they
do, they're ahead of everybody else by margins that are almost baffling. Hell,
the closest they come to having a competitor is Google against Facebook's Bing
ads.

I think that what's happening is more simply that Facebook saw Twitter had
something cool, and instead of making a set of features that were similar but
slightly different in irritating ways to set itself aside, it took Twitter's
ideas wholesale and credited them instantly. But that has nothing to do with
Facebook Lite, which is targeting people with slower computers.

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johns
If you believe the line that this is just to target slower
connections/computers, I have a car here to sell you. You may be right (I
happen to think differently) that they're not trying to compete with Twitter,
but it seems clear to me that they want to _be_ Twitter and be the darling of
the web again. I think Twitter has achieved mainstream notoriety that Facebook
envies and they're doing whatever they can to try to get themselves into the
position Twitter is in. If that means trying to sway heavy Twitter users with
a UI more to their liking, then that's what they'll do.

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unalone
Facebook doesn't want to be the darling. They want to polish their services
up, which is why they took Twitter's idea of life updates and removed their
selective feed. But they don't need media attention. They're perhaps the most
important site on the planet. Ask somebody between 14-22 which they'd rather
life without, Google or Facebook, and they'll go Facebook.

Yesterday I met, for the first time, a girl that thinks Facebook is the whole
Internet. She uses it for searching and mailing... everything. Apparently
there are a lot of people who do that. Facebook is enormous, and it gets
missed by a lot of people like us in the tech scene, because we don't think
about just how tech-illiterate most people are.

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GeneralMaximus
Doesn't work in India. Why? Weren't we the target audience?

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ananthrk
Works from me (in Chennai,TN)

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sahaj
looks a lot like an IM client... <http://imgur.com/kMmhx.gif>

