Facebook shut its Lite site after just seven months

Facebook has shut down its Lite site aimed at users with slow or poor internet connections.

The stripped down version of the original ran for around seven months.

Facebook posted a note on its own fan page thanking those who used Lite, adding that it had “learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site”.

“I think a lot of the Facebook experience was left out of Lite, especially the monetisable parts,” said Ray Valdes of Gartner Research.

“The other part of this decision is probably because they have improved the performance sufficiently with the main part of Facebook and made things run better that they didn’t need this back-up approach to cover a situation of low performance,” Mr Valdes told BBC News.

The technology blog ReadWriteWeb.com had described the Lite site as a “Twitter-like experience” of the popular microblogging service because it offered a smaller number of features than the fully-fledged site.

The options on Facebook Lite were limited to letting users write on their wall, post photos and videos, view events and browse other people’s profiles. There were no applications or special boxes.

“In some ways the Lite version was like using ad block on their own site – it stripped the site down to the very basics,” said Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.

The change was announced on Facebook’s own profile page and offered few details as to why the service has been closed down.

“It would seem not enough people were using it but then there was not a lot of awareness about the product. Tears will not be shed over the loss of Facebook Lite,” Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook.com told BBC News.

A number of commentators on the social media blog Mashable.com said that they used it because it was not blocked at their office while some said they thought it “would have been a nice support for low bandwidth nations”.

Twitter tries to calm developer fears over Tweetie acquisition

Company bought Tweetie to ‘avoid confusion’ among new Twitter users, says engineer

Ryan Sarver, an engineer at Twitter, said the company had acquired third-party client Tweetie in order to make it easier for newcomers to the microblogging service to download a Twitter app. Although there are dozens of third-party clients available, none are allowed to feature “Twitter” in there name, leading to potential confusion.

“We realised that it was causing massive confusion among user’s who had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time,” wrote Sarver in a blog post to the development community. “They would head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a new user wouldn’t find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost user for all of us. This means that we were missing out an opportunity to grow the userbase which is beneficial for the health of the entire ecosystem.”

Sarver also sought to allay the fears of developers who were concerned that Twitter might be about to launch its own suite of products and services traditionally catered for by third-party clients. He said that Twitter would never use the word “official” to describe a mobile or desktop app, but that the company would be adding new functionality to its site, and making acquisitions where appropriate to improve the ecosystem and user experience.

“Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users,” he acknowledged. “My promise is that we will be consistent in always focusing on what’s best for the user and the ecosystem as a whole and we will be sincere and honest in our communication with you.”

But industry commentators believe the acquisition of Tweetie could signal the death knell for third-party clients. “When all is said and done, the Twitter client market is dead, a winner has been chosen,” said Zee Kane, editor-in-chief of The Next Web. “The same thing happened for Twitter search and it will happen again for any other Twitter app niche.

“Who visits the App Store, sees ‘Twitter for iPhone’ and thinks it isn’t the official Twitter app? What chance to apps like Tweetdeck and Twittelator have when ‘Twitter for iPhone’ from Twitter ranks first on all Twitter keyword searches in the App Store?”

Twitter is holding Chirp, its first official developer conference, in San Francisco later this week. It appears its acquisition of Tweetie relates only to the iPhone app; Atebits, the company behind the third-party client, said it would be developing Tweetie for the Mac platform, and was putting together a beta as fast as it could.