Facebook Kills Lite Version of Site
PrintWhen Facebook launched Facebook Lite back in September it was a breath of fresh air. For many, the design of the regular site is confusing and cluttered. The Lite edition was great if you just wanted to pop in and checkout what your friends were up to. But all good things must end, and in this case it's ending too soon. Facebook is pulling the plug on the stripped down site. Trying to access the Facebook Lite now results in a redirect to the main site.
Facebook Lite used a very minimalist design. Users found a simplified settings menu, no obtrusive menu bars, and no applications bugging them. It was about the update stream more than anything else, and that's certainly enough for a lot of people. So why is the site going away? It's probably due to the fact that no one could find it. You had to know it was there to use it.
Facebook used to be a lot more like Facebook Lite, but as the service grew, feature creep set in. Not all the changes were awful taken by themselves, but the overall Facebook experience is becoming bloated. We're sorry to see Facebook Lite go. Hopefully they can learn some lessons from this experiment. Did you ever use Facebook Lite? Were you still using it when they dropped support?
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Alphadog
April 21, 2010 at 1:53pm
For the iPod or Android platforms, touch.facebook.com works very well and skips the bloat.
Firefox + AdBlock Plus is all you need to get rid of those ridiculous, pesky ads on Facebook. Or, you can try the Microsoft Silverlight Client for Facebook. It has a Zune-like interface with all of your FB content...kinda neat in its beta form.
Saltboy
April 21, 2010 at 5:27am
Use greasemonkey(add-on) and facebook purity (script for greasemonkey) on Firefox
big_montana
April 20, 2010 at 6:28pm
I used Lite from work as Facebook itself (as well as all social networking sites) are blocked. I guess I will have to resort to the crappy plugin in Yahoo again.
craigbooth
April 20, 2010 at 5:45pm
I used the lite version exclusively. It was not perfect, but it did away with the bloat of the normal site. Sadly, Facebook has become the new MySpace. I will probably use the iPhone version only from now on.
nHeroGo
April 20, 2010 at 5:24pm
I had no idea. I bet it would be good to use on phones.
I'll go out on a limb and say that pulling the plug on it because of limited use is probably a nice way of saying that you should expect advertisments soon to make FaceBook very profitable. Lite is not good for proposed green.
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