Facebook Lite

Here's a tip for all of my friends on Facebook, especially if they occasionally access Facebook from their cell phone: Facebook released earlier this week a new version of their web page. It's called Facebook Lite, and it's a scaled down version of Facebook's main page. Basically, the normal Facebook has three columns on its home page: a narrow left hand column that shows a picture of you and how many friends you have, a larger middle column that includes the meat of the site--all of the updates of your friends, and another more narrow column on the right side that usually contains a bunch of useless ads and junk that no one cares about.

The new Facebook Lite page only shows the larger middle column and leaves out the other two. It's not much to look at on a computer screen, and at first I didn't even see the point of it. But when I pasted the address into my cell phone's browser I realized that the page fit perfectly, and it was a much more satisfying experience than using either the web page designed for all mobile phones or the web page designed specifically for my Nokia 5800 (a phone which I hate, by the way).

My problem with the http://m.facebook.com/ page is that you can see that there are comments to someone's post, but you can't see what they are. Also, only status updates show on the home screen, not photos or anything like that.

Photos and other such updates DO show up on the web page custom built for my Nokia 5800 (a phone which I hate, by the way), but my problem with this page is that it doesn't say AT ALL on the main page whether or not there are comments to anything posted. I have to click through to the item to see if there are comments. This is a waste because--for my book--the comments are sometimes better than the actual posts.

Anyway, all of that is solved with Facebook Lite, which can be found, if you haven't already guessed, at http://lite.facebook.com/