Text-only Facebook Zero for phones gets MWC mention

MWC 2010: Liter than Lite

16 February 2010 16:16 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Low-calorie social networking has been announced at Mobile World Congress as far as your data bill goes as "Facebook Zero" has been mentioned by an FB exec.

Although no official release is yet doing the rounds, it seems Facebook Zero - due to go live at "zero.facebook.com" - will offer an even lighter version of Facebook than Facebook Lite with a text-only offering for budget browsers.

TechCrunch suggests the plan is to offer the service to mobile phone operators for free, who will in turn not charge customers to access Facebook Zero on their phones, until of course they want to click through to see a photo or other multimedia content at which point data charges will start to rack up.

The news has come out of a short mention from Facebook’s Chamath Palihapitiya during a MWC keynote, so we will update this post when we hear more.

UPDATE: Facebook has responded to our request for more info with the following explanation, promising even more info when it goes live:

"'Zero' is a light-weight version of m.facebook.com that omits data intensive applications like Photos. It will launch in coming weeks and we are discussing it at MWC as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage".

Via: techcrunch.com

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Software, Facebook, Facebook Zero, MWC2010, Apps