Facebook Lite discovered last night

Some Facebook users were surprised to dig up a new option called “Facebook Lite” last night.

Early speculation tied the service to Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, but Facebook Lite is not a different slant on Facebook- rather a lighter, simpler version of the service for those without fancy high speed connections. If you were one of the users selected to beta the service, here’s what you would have seen:

“You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite!

We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.

Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.”

Users report the message disappearing as quickly and unexpectedly as it appeared, followed by a sheepish message from Facebook admitting that the service is not yet ready to be rolled out to the US, and that anyone attempting to access lite.facebook.com would just be redirected to regular old Facebook. Currently, beta testing is taking place in China and India.

What a fantastic idea, huh? In fact, Facebook rival MySpace has already been there, done that according to PC World:

Facebook is not the first social network to offer a lite version. In May, MySpace launched a stripped down version of its site, called MySpace Lite View, for users worldwide with slower Internet speeds. You can access MySpace’s Lite version by visiting any MySpace profile and selecting the ‘Lite’ option on the left hand side of the navigation bar.

Huh. I had no idea because MySpace scares me.

[Image/Source: Mashable]