Facebook Lite: strips down!

The world's favorite social networking site Facebook has risen to the top in no time despite being a late comer in the industry and has completely triumphed over their rivals. What's the secret to their success?

If you ask me, I'd say:

• Status Update Feed.
  
• Chat.
  
• Poke.
  
• Pet Society.
  
• Mafia Wars.
  
• Farm Town.
  
• Restaurant City.
  
• My Calendar.
  
• Give your enemies rashes.
  

Okay I made the last one up, but still, the list goes on... Most of these are applications we have associated with Facebook and are a major contributor to their status quo. However, the recent buzz talks of Facebook getting ready to do away with all these and attempts to give you more with less. Introducing Facebook Lite, which is exactly the same as Facebook minus the applications, the quizzes, the requests for mundane activities you're not really interested in. Here's a sample screenshot. I chose someone's profile that's easy on the eyes ;) and have picked the ever popular queen of Philippine cosplays herself, Alodia Gosiengfiao.

They have kept the most used features which are the friend search and the status update feed. Twitter and Plurk users will definitely feel at home with this setup, since this brings Facebook close to being a micro blogging tool, also allowing you to insert url links, photos and videos. The comments are still enabled for each post. I'd say it's like Twitter, only more organized as it is easier to keep track of the responses. It's also like Plurk, only without the karma system (something that that you can either love or hate as people are encouraged to post a lot of spam uninformative messages :p). It appears that Facebook is doing this for either or both of the following reasons:

1. They have accepted that micro blogging is the future and are positioning themselves early.
   
2. To cater to users on a low bandwidth line to minimize packet data transfers.
   

Personally, I don't have any complaints with this direction. They might not be original in all their features but you have to recognize the effort they are putting in to improve their services and probably remain the best out there.