Facebook Lite: Whats the point?

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Facebook, for whatever reason, has decided that it would be better if it had a “smaller, stripped-down version” of itself online. Naturally, within a few weeks of its rumors, Facebook Lite was out and live. And now, I’ve been invited into the private beta. And it is practically what you’d get if you took the Facebook iPhone app and skinned it for a desktop browser. Most of the apps are gone, and everything is a clutter of wall posts and comments. I’m honestly not sure what Facebook is trying to do here.

I think that their main idea behind making Facebook lite was to give kids a way to access Facebook through another url when “www.facebook.com” was already blocked by their schools. The site has no scripting, no ajax, and besides the fact that it probably loads slower on ancient computers, has no visual improvements. I seriously want to know why they felt the need to do this.

Maybe Facebook is still peeved that Twitter isn’t owned by them yet. I know they tried to buy it once a while ago, failed, and then re-did the Facebook layout entirely to make it look similar to Twitter. Come on, Facebook, you’re better than that. Is this “Facebook Lite!” just another pathetic attempt to be more like Twitter? What are you going to do next, release “Facebook Status Update!” clients over Adobe Air like they did for Twitter? How about instead of re-coding a bare-bones version of your site, instead you work on improving the one you already have. Or make the iPhone app better. It still needs groups (which should be easily implemented), and it still doesn’t have some sort of offline feature, which people have been asking for for a while (as I’ve been told).

Regardless, I’m not usually one for rants, but when something (Like the Macbook Air or Windows Vistas) is released and really, really sucks, I feel obliged to throw in my two cents worth. I think thats fair, don’t you? Anyways, I need some sleep. Goodnight everyone.

*grumble grumble*