The net went crazy this week when Facebook let the cat about of the bag about its new service, Facebook Lite. According to Facebook the new service is aimed for mobiles and more areas with slow connection speeds i.e. the developing economies. Although Facebook boasts 250 million users worldwide, over 70% of those are based in Europe or North America where broadband internet is common place.

In developing countries where infrastructure for broadband is limited, mobiles phone are fast becoming the most attractive way of developing the internet. Take Pakistan as an example who is seeing 2 – 3 million new mobiles being registered every month. These economies present a significant growth opportunity for anyone who can get a foot hold early, as Twitter already are in the process of doing.

With the word out everyone is rushing to try and reach conclusions about what Facebook Lite is. The speculation has been fuelled by the rivalry that has grown between Facebook and Twitter, as to who is actually the hottest social media property.

It has to be said that screen shots of the new application do look suspiciously like Twitter.

So are Facebook trying to copy twitter? Realistically, no, not at the moment anyway. The site is aimed a countries with huge population centres and poor internet infrastructure. Think about how slow full Facebook is on dial up speed connections. The fact that testing has been based in India also goes a long way to support this conclusion.

So are we likely to see much of Facebook Lite in the UK over the coming months? Probably not as the plan is to roll the application out to Russia and China next. It may be possible that in the future Facebook Lite is released to the rest of the world for people who want speed over functionality but I wouldn’t believe the hype that this is a ‘’twitter killer’!