My last post about Facebook Lite was more about how close it takes Facebook to Twitter.This post talks about the another most striking feature of Facebook Lite – the absence of applications and quizzes. While it certainly makes the page look less cluttered and clean, and significantly reduces the page-weight (hence making it ‘Lite’), this is a significant change in user-experience over Facebook.
Applications, quizzes and games have been a key differentiator for Facebook over other social networks (read Orkut) and were among the key reasons for its stupendous rise in popularity across the world. Official Facebook worldwide statistics put the number of active applications on Facebook at 350,000; and every month more than 70% of Facebook users engage with platform applications. This application platform has attracted more than one million developers and entrepreneurs over 180 countries. It would be interesting to see how these 1 million developers of Facebook applications react to Facebook Lite.
When it comes to Facebook usage in India, a quick look at the Indian traffic data for Facebook applications on Vizisense shows that different applications residing on Facebook apps server are accessed by 2.9 million Indian unique users per month, which is a sizable chunk (36.61%) of the 7.91 million unique users per month base of Facebook in India. Also it is a known fact that Facebook has seen more traction and early adoption among the more evolved internet users in India. It has significantly higher following among the high-income and more-educated users who are expected to have access to high speed internet connections; and also are more evolved and regular internet users to understand and appreciate these Facebook applications. Facebook usage among income-group of more than Rs. 15 lakhs is 1.62 times national average, and that among PhD/Doctorate is 1.38 times the national average. Facebook has been a welcome substitute for people who had got bored with Orkut and also irritated by the spamming, privacy concerns and fake profiles over it. Check the screen-shot of Vizisense data below.
Facebook Demographics - Income and Education
This user-experience over Facebook Lite (with no applications) will not be a new thing. Those who access Facebook over its mobile site (m.facebook.com) get to see status updates, photos, external links, events from friends, but no applications. Facebook Lite will be extending this user-experience over web, of course with a much cleaner and easier page-design. Official Facebook statistics say that Facebook Mobile has over 65 million active users worldwide and that these mobile users are 50% more active than those over web. Assuming that more activity means more page-views, in India however numbers seems to be telling a different story.
| Unique Users/month | Page Views/month | Page-views per user per month | |
| Facebook India (overall) | 7.91 million | 774 million | 97.85 |
| Facebook Mobile India | 0.028 million | 0.783 million | 26.25 |
Above table clearly shows that Facebook usage over mobile is yet to pick up in India and engagement levels are dismally small as compared to overall Facebook; and my guess is that absence of applications is one of the key reasons for this.
In light of this data, absence of applications over Facebook Lite page does not seem to be the best step forward for Facebook in India, one of the only 2 countries (other being US) where Facebook is testing its Facebook Lite page. There seems to be more to this move than what is meeting the eyes, and better and faster service to users with slower internet connections certainly does not look like the end-objective of Facebook Lite.
Having said that, only time will tell if this new lighter Facebook Lite page which downloads quickly on slower internet connections – but with no applications – will change the above data and demographics for Facebook in India. If it’s succeeds, it would be interesting to see whom does it dethrone – Orkut or Twitter 
.
