Facebook Touch and Lite…
Facebook is the largest social networking site out there, with 350 millions active users. They have rolled out many revamps to their user interface. It seems that every rollout brings with it more features, more toys, and, well, more clutter.
Fortunately, you can cut through that clutter with two other versions of Facebook that strip out all the veggies and instead just give you the meat.
Before we get on to that, remember that you can become a Fan of The Digitante on Facebook by going to the my Fan Page.
Facebook Lite
I believe Facebook introduced the Facebook Lite version within the past six months or so. Basically, it consists of three elements: a menu bar, a main column, and a sidebar. Each of these elements contains minimal information. As you can see below, the left sidebar contains four items: Logo, Wall, Fans, and Photos & Video.
The regular Facebook page has the same setup, but in the sidebar, it has a logo, a free-form box, Information, Fans, Favorite Pages, Photos, and Links. If you navigate there, you will notice you have to scroll down in order to even get to the links box.
For what I typically do when visiting Facebook, the Lite view is great. It still contains key features such as the Like button, Comment button, and basic text information and photos of people.
Facebook Touch
I keep an eye on who visits my blog (not your name, just whether you are a returning reader, all anonymously) and where they come from. People visit from my friends’ sites that have links to The Digitante; others visit from search engines. About two months ago, I started seeing people arriving from Facebook Touch.
It turns out that Facebook Touch is the site used by people with touchscreen devices such as the Apple iPhone, the Palm Pre, the Blackberry Storm, and the Motorola Droid.
The layout has large buttons and everything is arranged in wide stripes. This makes it easy to get your fat, fumbling fingers where they need to go to get around.
Fortunately, the same properties that make it good for fingers also make it readable and simple. Instead of having a sidebar, Facebook Touch has two menus along the top and a single column of content. This makes it a nice top to bottom read. One tip on Facebook Touch on your computer: it works great if you narrow the browser window and dock it over along the edge of your screen.
Comparison
How do they look together? Here they are stacked:
As you can see, Facebook progressively gets less cluttered and my eyes, attention-span, and small computer screen are thankful for the alternatives.
Have you tried out any of these alternate Facebook sites? Visited Facebook on your touchscreen device? Got any other simple stripped down versions of visually overwhelming sites out there? Fill me in in the comments.
4 Responses to “Facebook Touch and Lite…”
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Great post! I was procrastinating this, but when I went through it took less than one minute.
Glad you got it taken care of.
In the next week, I’m going to be posting about passive barriers. I’ve always struggled with stupid little things like not filling out a form on my desk because my pen was out of reach. Its silly and I’ve had to really work on just doing things at the moment I remember.
Way to nip this one in the bud though!
I have been using Facebook Lite since it came out. I prefer it to the regular site since it is less cluttered. The only downside is that you can’t get to groups (at least I’m not aware of a way) in the Lite version. Otherwise, it’s great. I did take take me a little while to realize that the “Write” field was a status update and not a wall post.
I didn’t realize the Groups were not accessible. Good to know.