Facebook Lite yanked moments after debut
Posted
Aug 12 2009, 01:50 PM
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Minyanville
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This article was written by Minyanville's Nico Carbellano
Behold: Facebook Lite now walks among us. A beta version of the new service was mistakenly rolled out shortly after midnight, then yanked almost immediately. Now everyone is buzzing about what Facebook Lite really is -- is it Facebook's attempt to cut social-networking upstarts like Twitter off at the knees?
That might be a good idea, since Twitter is already looking more than a little wobbly following yet another high-profile hack this morning, which prompted many to ask: Would anyone really miss the service if it disappeared, any more than we now miss Pets.com?
Bing: Facebook Lite
Take a look at 10 of the highest-profile Internet failures of all time. Could Twitter be the latest name to join them?
Certainly, few of Twitter’s users actually, well, use the service at all. In fact, Ars Technica recently reported that 54.9% of Twitter’s users have never tweeted, and 52.7% have no followers to speak of. So much for the “social” part of this particular social network.
Facebook Lite, by contrast, would tap in to the site’s quarter of a billion active users, allowing them to keep up with a truly staggering amount of the daily minutiae of their friends’ lives second by second. And we do mean second by second: At any given moment, some 30 million people access Facebook via their cell phones -- a number that could go up dramatically given a lower-bandwidth, “lite” version of the service.
The new interface would also allow users in countries where Internet bandwidth is limited to more easily access the site -- which could be bad news for Friendster, which long ago fled the American market for the dubious title of “Southeast Asia’s most popular social network.”
Facebook Lite is currently being tested in India, and tests for China and Russia are slated for the near future. Next stop: the UK.
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