Users that complain about Facebook’s countless features leading to social networking bloat will soon be able to log in via a more simplified interface. Facebook Lite delivers all of your friends with none of the fat.

Facebook started rolling out access to the Facebook Lite beta to some users last night. While some might speculate that Facebook Lite is the fruit of this week’s Friendfeed acquisition, but it’s far too soon for that.

A screenshot (below) has begun circulating that details the user profile view from Facebook Lite. The screenshots only contain status updates from the user with comments, but it seems that the wall functionality is still intact.

Facebook Lite does away with a ‘Home’ tab for viewing your friends’ activity. It’s hard to tell whether the activity stream is accessible by clicking on the Facebook logo or clicking on ‘Friends’ on your profile page.

Also gone is the open text box for posting wall and status updates. Instead the box will pop open when a user clicks on ‘Write,’ which saves a bit of space at the top of the profile.

Hopefully gone from Facebook Lite is the annoyance of Facebook application noise in your friendstream. Along with the applications, Facebook can save its pokes, prods and quizzes for the full version.

The Facebook Lite interface is being characterized as a direct assault on the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. It may be more accurate to call it a continuing of Facebook’s earlier swiping of Twitter’s style.

However, the Lite interface could also serve to extend Facebook’s usefulness to less Web-savvy users. Facebook Lite’s sleeker styling could make Facebook easier to use for grandparents that might have a hard time navigating all of Facebook’s features and menus.

So far, it looks like Facebook has done an excellent job of eliminating all but the essential features. However, most of us will have to wait a while longer to test drive Facebook Lite for ourselves.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:56 am under Social Media, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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