• Mashable, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 12:19 PM

Can't Facebook just leave Twitter and its microblogging niche alone? Apparently not, as the social networking leader has begun testing a new service dubbed "Facebook Lite," which, by all appearances, could be quite the little Twitter killer.

Judging by screen-shots taken by some lucky members selected to test the service, "Lite" is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. Like a Twitter stream, users can see their most recent status updates and the updates of friends.

Word is that the new service was only designed for regions of the world with spotty and prohibitively expensive broadband service like India -- where it is, in fact, being tested. That has convinced TechCrunch -- at least for the moment -- that Facebook's intentions are benign.

That Facebook isn't down Twitter's neck is hard to believe, however, particularly given its moves, announced earlier this week, to buy FriendFeed for $50 million, and then roll out a real-time search capability.

What's more, on the eve of Facebook's most recent redesign, the company's top decision-makers made it clear just how bullish they all were on the real-time Web, the instant Web, or whatever you want to call it. The future of social networking, they all agreed, is in the present.

At the very least, and as Mashable puts so well, "Facebook's clearly up to something big." For John Battelle, meanwhile, the development just proves another in a long line of Nostradamus-like prophesies he made years ago.

Read the whole story at Mashable »