Facebook Zero – Facebook on diet

Facebook on diet, or something like this? Facebook announced a slimmed down version, Facebook Zero, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. With this Facebook Zero version, you can access Facebook on slow connections (comes in handy especially here in the Philippines). It is also useful for basic mobile phones. The Zero version of Facebook will go live in the next few weeks. Zero will not do images, videos or other bandwidth hungry features by default. A more feature rich version of Facebook Zero is planned together with some mobile operators.

Out of the over 400 Million users some 100 Million access Facebook via their mobile site. So Zero should make life easier for many of us. And obviously Facebook is trying to cater to nearly everyone and probably also gain some new users with the new version. There is already a Facebook lite for slow internet connections but on normal computers, which is mostly aimed at countries where the internet is not yet developed enough.

Try going to zero.facebook.com and you will still get an error message. There might be different ways for Facebook to make use of the new Zero. One could think that deals with mobile carriers similar to Apples iPhone are in the making, but this needs to be seen. The basic version of Zero for free, the premium only for paying customers? Let’s see. Which version do you use mostly? How often do you use Facebook on the go from your mobile?