September 10th, 2009
Quicker than you can say Facebook Lite
Last time I checked, when you logged into Facebook’s home page, over 1 megabyte of Javascript was being executed. For a dialup connection, that could take up to 3 minutes to load.
Welcome to Facebook Lite (Techmeme):
When I tested out lite.facebook.com in my Firebug net panel, it loaded in just over 3 seconds, which is excellent compared to regular Facebook:
And two of those seconds was taken up by loading 3500+ friends’ data into my search dropdown. So it loads in basically a second.
The photos pages are dramatically better too. No more missing photos or Ajax. These pages load so fast. And the design is better:
The settings page is simpler too:
Regular Facebook took me 7 seconds when I tried just now. What is the point of even having regular Facebook, when this version of the site is so fast and easier to use?
My “lite” profile page loaded in under a half a second, even with hundreds of new wall posts today.
I’m really impressed by this slimmer version of Facebook. Will it make me stop using Twitter? Absolutely not. Twitter is more of a communication platform than a social network. It’s a means of communicating. Maybe they will even go slimmer?
Facebook is more of a pool of social data to me. I post to Twitter, and read on Facebook. But now if Facebook is a lot faster, maybe I will spend more time posting there. The data is richer when I post a link too, which really keeps me going back.
What do you think of Facebook Lite?
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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