The social networking giant has unveiled the public beta of Facebook Lite, the new barebones Facebook interface designed for people in India, Russia, and China, who are plagued with slow Internet connections. It works pretty well and could score high with just about everyone who dislikes its full-blown counterpart.

Currently in the preview stage, Facebook Lite is open to anyone with a Facebook account. The new interface is available now at lite.facebook.com.

Basically a stripped-down version of the real thing, Facebook Lite features spartan design that removes all unnecessary graphics to improve loading times. The lack of applications is another performance-focused measure, as is a limited search engine focused on your friends, disregarding other items that the full-blown site can search through, such as pages, events, etc.

The Facebook Lite homepage provides a newsfeed of your friends’ activities, with the option to switch between full stories and top stories. Notifications are also present, as are Like and Comment features provided alongside items in your newsfeed. The minimalistic Publisher enables you to write status updates and post photos or videos. Inbox appears fully implemented, including message archive, the search, and new message composition. The Events feature provides only a handy list of upcoming events.

When you visit someone’s profile (or your own), you can check the person’s Wall, profile information, photo albums, and friends list, with the latter being enhanced with toggles filtering full friends, only mutual friends, and pages that the person is a fan of. Facebook Lite also lets you edit your profile, albeit only your favorites and basic profile information. You can also tag photos, view and create albums, and comment/like photos. Unfortunately, it appears that you can’t change your profile photo.

You can also use Facebook Lite to edit basic account settings (email, password, mobile, and language), in addition to privacy preferences (profile, friendships, external websites). However, none of the account settings were ready at press time, except the ability to change Facebook language. “We’re working as quickly as we can to finish Facebook Lite,” said the notice whenever we tried accessing these features.

In order to optimize the site for speed and slow Internet connections, Facebook Lite ditches bandwidth-hungry features found in its full-blown counterpart, including applications, and the beloved Facebook chat. Although online reports claim that Facebook Lite is currently available only in the U.S. and India, we were able to confirm that the site is in fact accessible from other territories, including Europe.

Read more at Facebook Lite

Christian’s Opinion

I must admit, I was skeptical when I first heard that Facebook is pitching Facebook Lite as the barebones social networking at the speed of light. I changed my mind the moment I tried the new Lite interface. It’s fast and streamlined, yet useful. Granted, if you don’t need applications and anything else beyond basic network building features, Facebook Lite could work well for you. In fact, I’m already inclined to use Facebook Lite for quick check-ups, reverting to the full-blown Facebook site only when I need apps, Facebook chat, and other features beyond just keeping in touch.

Let me also stress that I’ve tested Facebook Lite on my iPhone 3G on both EDGE and 3G. While EDGE provided a sub-par, although still bearable experience, the 3G connection worked remarkably well for Facebook Lite. That said, I think that Facebook Lite could appeal to a far broader population than just users from India, Russia, and China, as the company originally conceived. Is Facebook Lite a Twitter killer? We’ll see….