Blog for Youth

Facebook recently teamed up with 50 wireless operators for offering a stripped-down version of the social networking site to cellphone users. This facility will allow users to access without incurring data charges.

This new site, dubbed 0.facebook.com, can be termed as a text-only version of flagship internet site of Facebook and is particularly designed for mobile phones with limited bandwidth Internet connections.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

The new site will be available beginning on Tuesday in 40 different countries, including Brazil, India, Indonesia and Turkey from a variety of carriers.

The new site comes as the world’s largest Internet social network continues to grow its base and looks for ways to increase the amount of time Web surfers spend using its service.

At the company’s annual developer’s conference last month, Facebook introduced new technology that allows third-party Web sites to integrate Facebook features directly.

Roughly one quarter of Facebook’s 400 million users access the site on mobile devices, according to the company.

But Facebook wants to make the service more accessible to cell phone users who do not own high-end smartphones such as Apple Inc’s iPhone, or phones based on Google Inc’s Android software.

“We are targeting people whose major barrier is they have little experience on the mobile Internet. They want to try it, they want something super simple, super fast. And they are potentially afraid of browsing costs,” said Henri Moissinac, who heads Facebook’s mobile business. “If you take an iPhone user in San Francisco, that’s not his problem.”

Among the carriers partnering with Facebook are Reliance and Videocon in India (with Tata Docomo coming soon), T-Mobile in Hungary and Vodafone in Greece.

Henri Moissinac, who heads Facebook’s mobile business, said though this service is presently not available in the United States, the same is expected in the near future.

In today’s times, the role of social networking has changed to a great extent than what it was till a few years ago. This is mainly because social networking sites have emerged as forms of online communities during the popular years of social web.

The purposes of a social network may vary from one individual to another. While they must be merely concerned with having fun with friends for some, they may also mean finding friends and communicating ideologies to the world at large with just a few clicks for many others. Whatever may be the reason, the use of a social network in today’s times is mainly for the purpose of inciting users to leave traces about their online presence in one form or the other.

By telling a few things about himself and his present state of work or mind can allow other users to form an image of their counterpart on other side of the PC. In these times of spatial distances, having this kind of passive interactions with long-lost friends, relatives, colleagues, and even unknown people seems to be kind of a blessing in the otherwise self-obsessed world of today.

One of the benefits of creating and maintaining an online presence with networking sites is the easy and effective complementing of varying services on the web, which can be used by any one from any part of the world to create and share descriptions of certain presence aspects, even via mobile. In short, the concept of maintaining an effective online presence in social networks is going great guns and if you are not a part of these networks, you are surely missing many interesting things before you.