Last week, Facebook announced their Facebook Zero initiative which is overall pretty impressive. This of course meant seeing billboards all over Abidjan last weekend letting people know about it, such as the one you see above (plastic garbage under it is optional.) The billboards are a bit scaled down though and not the substitute-for-paint type that you see along the sides of buildings as it would appear the MTN (whom is the Facebook Zero partner in Côte d'Ivoire) is spending their money on billboards for the World Cup of which they are the official mobile sponsor.
Now at this point, Erik has written about it, Wayan has written about it, Kevin has written about it, and Steve has written about it. In this White Guy African Technology Choir, the one refrain that I didn't find was in regards to Twitter, so this white guy would like to mention a few things about that.
It's important to note that despite what anyone might say about privacy or quashing local development, this was an incredibly deft move by Facebook to counter Twitter's adoption. For some reason, Facebook still sees itself as a challenger to Twitter, although I find them completely different. For one thing, I think that Facebook is near its apex in the US. It needs to expand in markets where it hardly exists such as Africa. Twitter, while used in Africa, is quite weak there as they did the end-all, be-all of dumbshit moves when they cut off SMS access to be only available from countries where they have an established shortcode provider. This meant that those of us in all of Africa only had the web or mobile web interface (which is good albeit costly) to use when really, the SMS method is vastly superior when it is the once in a blue moon that an SMS goes through properly.
It's this lack of access that Facebook has been very clever to exploit and will easily surpass Twitter in these markets as it will be much more readily available. I think that Facebook's drive to get everyone on the planet in their system as well as try and best Twitter is the main reason for this because really, paying to get new users is something I would say is more an act of desperation if the situation were different. Now if only I had MTN instead of Orange and Moov to give it a whirl...
Over the last two days, beyond misplaced next generation iPhones, Apple earnings, and the Facebook f8 conference, a rather minor blip on the tech radar has been the announcement that Facebook has shut down its Lite Version. It almost seems silly to link to that given that it just redirects back to the main Facebook page. For those who never used it (which is understandable given that it wasn't marketed all that well), this was a stripped-down version of Facebook more suited for those with limited bandwidth connections. All told, the version got a mere seven months of active service before being killed, which I think was only bested by US hardware store chain, Home Depot, killing off a Spanish version of their site four months after launch. Why would a company put so much effort in to a piece of their product line to then kill it off in its infancy? A number of pundits have weighed in on this.
Bill Ray at The Register wrote:
The problem with cutting the fluff from Facebook is that it's the fluff that people want. Social networking is all very well, but for most users it's about accumulating contacts who can be impressed by your FarmVille score or the size of your castle.
Liz Gannes hit on a more important element:
One reason not to like Lite? It showed limited advertising and was disconnected from features like Facebook pages and applications. Ad Age called it “a black hole for brands.” Not a good idea to irritate the people who pay the bills.
This was also echoed by a quote in a BBC article:
"In some ways the Lite version was like using ad block [a plugin to strip ads out of websites] on their own site - it stripped the site down to the very basics," said Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.
But as much as I don't like linking to TechCrunch articles are they don't like linking out, I think that MG Siegler wrote some of the best points on the issue:
And that’s why the news today that Facebook has killed off the lite version of its site is disappointing — not because it was great, but because it was better......Facebook Lite was not perfect, but I suspect that the main problem with the site was that Facebook made it hard to find. Unless you enabled a toolbar (yes, another damn toolbar) along the top of the site to easily switch back and forth, it was nearly impossible to figure out how to do so.
I think that the real question in all of this is whether you are more of a Facebook person or more of a Twitter person. Me personally, my first introduction to Twitter was some loud, obnoxious moron in a bar in San Francisco trying to impress some girl by telling all about how amazing Twitter was back in 2007. Needless to say, I got in to Facebook more. But, as time went on, Facebook started bugging the crap out of me. They would add and take away features at random and reorder the page in ways that drove me nuts. Bit by bit, I've turned towards Twitter now as my chosen social media weapon after blogging. Facebook just serves as a tie-in to my Twitter where my updates can be echoed.
This is why the Lite version was so good for Facebook and as Siegler noted, it's why it had to go. It really was a superior Facebook. In terms of bandwidth access it was better and it's really a shame that they didn't market and deploy it properly to African users as people here are all over Facebook and it's manly to socialize or promote pages and groups. I don't see tons of interaction with applications because de facto, they don't load well with the high latency you typically have. I mean, updating my bragging page Where I've Been page is insanely painful and I can only do it late at night when the bandwidth creeps back up a notch.
But Twitter has been to date, so much simpler. It allows me to interact with people so much easier and it doesn't have all this extra crap, which of course means that it doesn't have the ads either; basically Facebook Lite with 140 characters. I'm just a little annoyed that as time goes on, Twitter gets more mushy, complicated, and for lack of a better word, doughy. For instance, last night, it was obvious that one small bit of their JavaScript was offline and I couldn't retweet, post, or view older tweets. Basically, it was dead due to a simple script error. And here I thought I missed the Fail Whale.
As much as I think that mobile is an over-hyped bubble, it appears to all come back to the mobile versions of both Facebook and Twitter. That is where both companies are putting their low bandwidth, easy to use interface money these days, which is ironic given that mobile connections often have more bandwidth than land connections. But thankfully these sites are available via the web, so if you're in a bind, you can use them on a regular machine, which sometimes I find myself doing with Twitter.
This fellow, Vincenzo Cosenza recently published a World Map of Social Networks on December 6th and it just happens that large blogging outfits such as TechCrunch are picking up on it today.
It's a really cool map that does indeed show that Facebook and their currently more than a 1/3 of a billion users are slowly sucking in all the rest of the users in the world. Not too much shocking there are Facebook grows like Borg these days. I mean, even my mom is on it, although she is thoroughly not in to it.
What is more of a surprise is that there actually isn't a massive void between South Africa and North Africa on the map. Amazingly, there are some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa on the map, as if they actually do exist. I know, it's shocking. Naturally, there could be more and it goes to show that Alexa is not accurately measuring statistics in Africa as I know that there are scads of people using Facebook and Twitter in countries that aren't listed on that map, such as I, don't know... Mali, Benin, and Togo amongst others? Couldn't they have just tossed Facebook over those countries just for the hell of it so that they could be included?
Still, an interesting map if you're curious about such things. Although, like I said, it shows few surprises in the social network landscape, which is why it's getting rather humdrum to some extent since there is little competition (I don't put Facebook and Twitter in to the same group) and thus, little exciting in innovation these days.
