Facebook turns its 'Lite' off

BANGALORE, INDIA: Seven months after Facebook embarked on a much hyped venture to launch a 'stripped down version' of the social network named Facebook Lite, the company has scrapped the project.

Announcing its back-off from the plan, Facebook on Tuesday said on its fans page, “Thanks to everyone who tried out Facebook Lite. We're no longer supporting it, but learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site. If you used Lite, you'll now be taken to the main Facebook.com site.”

Facebook had been too aggressive about the light version when it commenced the development of Lite as it sent out test URLs for users to check the new version and give their feedback. Since then much has been written about this venture. Some said Facebook is directly targeting Twitter as the new version is very light and aims to increase the social networking speed.

Some user blogs had said that Facebook Lite appeared to be a more Twitter-like. One user had noted, “It looks like a simplified version of Twitter with comments enabled. On second thought, it looks like simplified FriendFeed.” FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook for around $50 million around that time.

Meanwhile, according to Cnet, Facebook on the other side has been announcing some more complex new features in advance of its F8 developer conference - like Community Pages, which are user-edited discussion hubs that look to be in the same vein as Wikipedia.