Facebook Lite closes down

Facebook Lite: Gone

Ah well. With increasing wireless connections and more powerful and faster smartphones, it was only going to be a matter of time, but today Facebook shut down its Lite site, an interface for those with slow or poor internet connections. It had lasted seven months.

In a statement, Facebook said it had "learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site". Among them was probably the fact that assorted monetised items and other schemes were left unavailable to a host of users.

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Facebook Lite had been described as a "Twitter-like experience" because it offered a smaller number of features than the fully-fledged site. Users could only write on their wall, post photos and videos, view events and browse other people's profiles. There were no applications or special boxes.

This stripped-down version my have seemed like a good idea at the time, helping those with low-bandwidth connections to use the service but it seems lack of awareness and poor usage meant that Facebook went essentially unused.

With the stripped down version of the site proving unpopular, one can only wonder how it is before Facebook Zero, the stripped-down, text-only version of its mobile site, lasts before it too disappears for good.

A recent survey from GSM Association recently revealed that Facebook accounts for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their phones - during December that was a total of 2.2 billion minutes.

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Timon Singh

Timon Singh is a graduate of Liverpool University where he received a degree in Social and Economic History. He has previously worked for BBC Magazines on BBC Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, the publication for the popular genealogy show.

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