Facebook has made a potentially risky choice in designing Lite, the simpler version of its social network that is generating much buzz: Lite doesn't run any of the tens of thousands of external applications built for Facebook's main site.
While Lite was originally intended for countries with low-bandwidth users, the site has gotten an initial round of endorsements from pundits and experts in the blogosphere now that it's available to Facebook members in the U.S.
Considering how U.S. Internet users readily embrace simple online services that they find useful, such as Google and Twitter, it will be interesting to see what percentage of Facebook members will adopt Lite as their preferred Facebook site.
If it's a sizeable chunk, Facebook may have to consider opening Lite to the third-party applications, so that developers don't lose access to a big segment of Facebook users.
The question is whether it will be possible to maintain Lite's appeal as a stripped-down version of Facebook if it's tweaked to support external applications. A compromise solution might be to create a separate application platform for Lite.
More: http://computerworld.com/s/article/9137904/
While Lite was originally intended for countries with low-bandwidth users, the site has gotten an initial round of endorsements from pundits and experts in the blogosphere now that it's available to Facebook members in the U.S.
Considering how U.S. Internet users readily embrace simple online services that they find useful, such as Google and Twitter, it will be interesting to see what percentage of Facebook members will adopt Lite as their preferred Facebook site.
If it's a sizeable chunk, Facebook may have to consider opening Lite to the third-party applications, so that developers don't lose access to a big segment of Facebook users.
The question is whether it will be possible to maintain Lite's appeal as a stripped-down version of Facebook if it's tweaked to support external applications. A compromise solution might be to create a separate application platform for Lite.
More: http://computerworld.com/s/article/9137904/