Facebook going 0 (0.facebook.com)

DiGi Malaysia now supports this feature

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students. IT is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Since September 2006, anyone who confirms themselves to be over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address can become a Facebook user. Facebook’s target audience is more for youths than adults. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Facebook said it has teamed up with mobile operators in nearly 50 countries to offer a fast and free version of the popular social networking site on handphones. And for Malaysia, one of the most innovative telecommunication service provider – DiGi (Always the smarter choice) had taken up a big leap in this issue. When contacted, a DiGi spokesman said that the company is in the middle of testing of the service but declined to reveal a launch date. Representatives from Maxis and Celcom could not be reached at press time.

According to the head of mobile business for Facebook, Henri Moissinac, he said that development team had put all the graphics, the photos, the videos one click away so the site is text only and the pages are super light, super fast to load. The new mobile site, 0.facebook.com, is optimised for speed and it’s free, he also said it was designed to get around the biggest barriers to the mobile Internet — the speed of the experience and the potential cost of browsing. It will be faster than the current mobile site.

It will be available from 56 mobile operators in 47 countries. The total subscriber base of all of these operators is about 500 million users, so potentially you have 500 million mobile subscribers who could access Facebook mobile for free on their phone. There were currently over 100 million active users of Facebook’s present mobile site, m.facebook.com and the new site would allow the Palo Alto, California-based social network to expand its reach on the devices.

This development was aimed to goal in mobile is to serve every user on every phone in every language on every network. Users of 0.facebook.com can update their status, see their News Feed, comment on posts and send and reply to messages like on Facebook.com. If users wish to access into pages with photos and videos, they will be charged.

Of course it has a disclaimer that says the user is about to enter the photos / videos page and will be charged on respective data plan signed up with their service provider. Facebook in Washington also said that 0.facebook.com was designed to be a “permanent service. All of the operators are committed to making 0.facebook.com free for more than 12 months. So people! Wait until it comes to Malaysia in no time.

Tested on both DiGi 3G and Maxis 3G. I bet Celcom the same currently.