So, facebook released the (public beta) of the “lite” version of their service, last week. Some think that facebook lite is just a response to twitter’s popularity and the trend of real-time web. Especially with facebook acquiring friendfeed and then releasing the code in a open source project called tornado. Still, there is more than just imitating the hot new kid on the block. Here is why:

Facebook lite is has two goals:

• Making the user experience simpler, by removing unnecessary functions or noise.
• Making the service usable in countries or places where there is a lack of broadband internet

Facebook needed to change this because it is too hard to use for most celebrities, as stated in this post about twitter being underhyped:

Other services are too hard for the celebrities to use, particularly from their mobile phones. I’ve been using the new Facebook app on my iPhone, but it has some severe limitations for businesses and celebrities.

Later Scoble states what are the problems with facebook today and it’s limitations:

Facebook has brand troubles. Most people like facebook for its private features (my wife can send me and a select group of friends our baby photos, for instance but the newer public features, like fan pages, are misunderstood). If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would split these two usage models into two: one usage model that’s kept behind the privacy walls. Another that I would call "facebook public" that would be all the totally public features, including search and APIs.

Twitter might rule Hollywood because of its simplicity, anybody can send a SMS. Also if you think about it, it gives celebrities a direct connection to their fans, eliminating the middle man: media. Even if they use ghost writers [link a ghost writers], they have more control than using media.

The above lead me to think that facebook doesn’t care about the average Jane or Joe posting on twitter, but getting the celebrities or public figures. They have been pitching to them (celebrities), to use the fan pages in facebook, but have had  little success compared to twitter. This is due to their complexity and ambiguity of facebook fan pages. With facebook lite, things might change, thanks to a redesign of the newsfeed (or stories). In the new design, we have three buttons to post: text, photos or video. Also we have nested comments, excluding the image of the friend that commented. And that is all, no more birthdays and other unnecessary information.

Still is very hard  to make celebrities do everything through facebook, even with the twitter facebook app.

If you think facebook is not going after celebrities and public figures, then just read this from the facebook blog:

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.

If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

As you can see, the idea is to bring celebrities and public figures on board of the facebook ship and from there they can take row boats (i.e twitter) to get to other places.

No Clone Wars for you

I must admit that twitter and facebook lite are very similar, it might even be seen as a upgrade to twitter (with threading and no character limits), still there is more than what meets the eye. First of all, twitter’s connections with others is loose: if your profile is public anybody can follow you or see your posts. In contrast facebook requires both parties need to agree (one sends the requests the other accepts) to be able to become friends. This difference between how people form “ties” or connections, is what determines how both services will be used.

Facebook original idea is to connect and keep in touch with people you knew face to face. The reason you may need facebook to keep in touch, rather than using traditional tools like Instant Messaging, Email, Phone, etc. Since you know this people you’re connecting with (because of the strong ties made while meeting face to face), in theory you want them to see and share photos and videos from trips, parties and everyday life. In the case of twitter things are very different, initially the idea was to test a new paradigm of communication, or broadcasting what are you doing and sharing ideas. Anybody could follow what where you doing and what ideas you are sharing, meaning that you could follow 20 people, while you are being followed by 4932. Soon it became a source of information (accurate or inaccurate) of what is happening, resulting in a representation of the real-time web.

How you connect with people and how the customer pain was solved, is what makes facebook: facebook and twitter: (you guessed right) twitter. Even if facebooks clones the User eXperience of twitter, facebook will never be a replacement of twitter. However we never said that twitter or any other service out there, could become a extension of facebook, now that is Google scary.