Facebook is clearly looking to expand the boundaries of their services. Just a few days ago they acquired Friendfeed, and now it has been reported that they have begun testing a new service of theirs- Facebook Lite. As the name suggests, it is a stripped down version of full Facebook- a faster, simpler version.

Yesterday, thousands of Facebook users were chosen to test the beta version. Many logged on to see this message on their home page:

Unfortunately, I haven’t been selected as of yet, but hopefully we will be able to post a review of sorts of the service.

There is debate whether Facebook Lite is another direct attack on Twitter. Facebook has been trying to make itself more competitive with Twitter over the last few months. It has been introducing features such as  public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. This new service is another attempt to simplify Facebook, but whether it has anything to do with Twitter or Friendfeed, is just speculation so far.

Facebooks official response was:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake. We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time. People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

Given that only handful of users have been selected for testing, getting a preview screenshot of Facebook lite is quite difficult. However, courtesy of jasonlbaptiste.com, we have a screenshot to show what Lite looks like:

From this screenshot, there doesn’t seem to be that much different from the normal Facebook, but it does seem to have a much more cleaner, polished feel to it. Arguably the normal Facebook, has evolved into a much more cluttered site than it was, so this Lite version seems very interesting.

What are your opinions of Facebook Lite? Do you think the main intention is to create a speedier version for slow connections, or is there a hint of a direct attack on Twitter? Will people use it? If any readers have also been lucky enough to test it, please do feel free to write you thoughts in the comments!