Facebook tweets to go lite

Mark Zuckerbeg created Facemash and later TheFacebook from his dorm room in Harvard University in 2003. On February 4, 2004. Mark dropped the The and launched Facebook.com - a social networking website where you can add friends, send them messages, and update their personal profile pages. Five years later in 2009, Facebook was ranked as the most used social network followed by MySpace in a study by compete.com. Buzzpoint puts Facebook's massive 250 million user number into perspective by saying that if Facebook were a country , it would be the fourth most populous nation on the planet!

It's interesting to note that while Facebook did jump a rank up from last year's number 2 to become the number 1, Twitter jumped 19 ranks to become the number 3 social network. Did this raise an alarm in Facebook's inner circles and are they possibly threatened by the new twid on the weblock? (twitter kid on the web block!) J Owyang says "Facebook absolutely recognizes that Twitter is a threat, and they're doing what they can do to replicate the features before Twitter gets mainstream adoption".

Last week, Facebook launched a lighter version - Facebook Lite in US and India that resembles Twitter's stream of status updates. It offers fewer services and has done away with most of its third party applications or special boxes.

ReadWriteWeb adds on that Facebook Lite turns Facebook into a very Twitter-like experience. However, a Facebook spokeswoman played down the charges and said "We've been making iterations to our product over time to reflect the rapid evolution of how people share information online." Whatever the case be, imitation is a tried and tested strategy for big internet companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL) - copy the best new features from smaller startups and gradually introduce them over time to a mainstream audience.

Personally, I liked Facebook Lite and although they have taken cues from Twitter, they've sticked to what they are best at - connecting me to my friends! All the stories in the news feed about the quizzes people take, Farmville, etc are gone! Facebook lite is simply a user's delight!