Facebook has no doubt been an innovation engine in the past few years. The site has always brought out features which have led in innovation and later copied by other websites. A few examples are 1) The security features in facebook, which ofcourse were later copied in Orkut. 2) The ability to make applications and allowing such applications to be on facebook, and ofcourse Orkut made an unsuccessful attempt at copying this as well. 3) Facebook Chat, Quizzes, Pictures, Personalized Links. Now the latest news from Facebook is … not friendfeed but rather Facebook Lite! Aimed to be a fast loading, simplified version of facebook. Copying from a statement made by facebook

The new service would be a “faster, simpler version similar to the Facebook experience you get on a mobile phone”. “Facebook Lite is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept friend requests, write on people’s walls, and look at photos and status updates,” the statement continued.

Now I can see 2 wonderful uses of Facebook Lite! Firstly targeting the third world countries where broadband has not spread completely. Secondly the mobile phone networks which are now providing internet service but not the best speeds. Capturing both can be quite easy and strategically important.

Capturing Third World Countries: The third world countries can now be better called the Emerging Markets. Over the past few years the focus has shifted significantly with studies like Bottom of the Pyramid, the EM stock markets doing very well and ofcourse the current recession. Still the focus on the internet has traditionally been on developed world and mostly the US, why? because that is where companies advertise on the internet. Orkut can be seen as a crown jewel of a website which became successfull in emerging markets by capturing Brazil and India. Yet Google never really developed it further, did not have any good developments, anything to develop the EM audience better. Now Facebook is making a challenge to Orkut and Google. By capturing these markets they are kind of 1) securing the future as people call it 2) making a global space where everyone can connect.

Mobile Phones: Not everyone has a computer but almost everyone today has a mobile! To capture this market will make Facebook ubiquitous. The cellular networks are trying to provide faster internet but with limited success. If fb lite can capture this market then it captures everything. More importantly this is going to spread facebook even better in third world countries, for example India, where the number of mobile phone users is exploding and cellular service providers are now allowing internet access at much cheaper rates.

Inspired from Twitter? Maybe this is true, maybe this isn’t but I get the feeling that fb lite might have got some inspiration from Twitter and its layout. Twitter has been applauded for its simple layout and ease of usage. This feature of Twitter has also made it extremely popular on Mobile phones. Fb lite could have been inspired by this and maybe developed as a way to challenge this. Fb lite will most probably provide a very easy way to update the fb status and might want to pose a challenge to twitter. Well this could actually work out to be an interesting web battle! With Msn + Yahoo trying to beat Google in Search, Facebook trying to beat Twitter, Twitter trying to beat Google in real time search, Blogs trying to beat Newspapers, Google trying to beat Microsoft Windows through its OS, Apple trying to beat all the music labels and phone makers … the coming few years are going to be really interesting!

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