Facebook Lite starts to go international with translations

October 6, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments | |

Facebook Lite, a faster-loading and simpler version of the site meant to speed adoption in developing countries, is finally starting to go international after a test in the U.S.

As the social network pushes past 300 million users worldwide, the company is looking abroad to fuel user growth. To get there, it needs to accommodate slower Internet connections and unfamiliarity with the site. So the company decided to test out a simpler, parallel version of the site called Facebook Lite.

After releasing it to English-speaking U.S. users, Facebook has made Lite available in about 70 languages today including Pirate-speak and Upside Down English. There are, of course, actual languages like French and Spanish too.

If Lite proves successful, the company may adopt some of its best features back on the original site. Among other differences, Lite’s news feed has stories both ordered chronologically and ‘Top Stories’, which have more comments from friends.

TheNextWeb released a possible glimpse of some design updates to the original Facebook site today.

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About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • andryi
    Facebook the best!!!
  • andryi
    Facebook the best!!!
  • Chris Gnut
    This is great news. Nice to see increasing commitment from these firms to expand their sites into global markets. However if you are interested in enabling your website to expand into global markets in a similar manner, not just Facebook's, there aren't many options for us. I personally use a new subscription service (NativeTung.com) to reach new global users and it seems to work very well.