Facebook unleashes Tornado, launches Facebook Lite in the U.S. and India (English only) and begins to roll out a @ tagging tool to help users better connect. Lite's news feed lets users write, post photos and videos, but unlike the fatter Facebook, there is no toolbar for enabling access to Facebook Pages, Status Updates, Photos and Links. Lite's profile pages are leaner, too. Meanwhile, when users want to add a friend's name in status updates and other posts from the Facebook Publisher, they can include the @ symbol before that friend's name.
Facebook can brag of a busy Sept. 10, 2009.
The social network released the
FriendFeed Web server to open source, which readers can learn more about
here. The company also launched its Facebook Lite version and began rolling out
a new tagging feature for the site.
Facebook Lite, which eWEEK
reported on last month, is a faster, albeit stripped down version of the social
network designed for countries that have bandwidth speed or cost constraints.
In a side-by-side comparison, the differences are striking.
Facebook Lite
seems to hark back to 2006, when the social network was lean. That was before it became
cluttered with new features, applications and, well, more content than most
users know what to do with.
Lite's news feed lets users write, post photos and videos,
but unlike the fatter
Facebook, there is no toolbar for enabling access to
Facebook Pages, Status Updates, Photos and Links. Lite's profile pages are leaner,
too. While the middle column of users' profiles in Facebook Lite looks similar
to that of the regular Facebook profile, the left and right columns in Lite are pretty bare, lacking
the glut of photos, ads, applications and gaming invites of the original
Facebook.
Lite is lighter, in the sense that moving from tab
to tab is noticeably faster than the regular Facebook. This is sure to make it
popular with users craving speed over the fatness of all of Facebook's
features.
Facebook said Lite is
being previewed in the United States and India, but is currently in English only. Read
more about this speedy version on
TechMeme here.
Facebook also is in the process of improving its tagging
functionality, taking a page out of Twitter's popular yet simple @ function to
tag users.
When users want to add a friend's name in status updates
and other posts from the Facebook Publisher, they can include the @ symbol
before that friend's name, according to Facebook engineer Tom Occhino, who
wrote:
"As you type the name of what you would like to
reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your
list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications
and Pages."
Friends tagged in status updates will receive a
notification and a Wall post linking them to a post. Friends will also have the
option to remove tags of themselves from posts. The @ symbol will not be
displayed in the published status update or post after tags have been added.
Facebook is in the process of rolling this feature out to
its 250 million-plus users over the next few weeks. Eventually, users will be
able to tag friends from applications as well with the @ symbol. Read more
about this feature
here on TechMeme.
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