Access FaceBook On Your Mobile

High octane socialites unable to wrench themselves away from their computers for fear of missing a ‘poke’ from an admirer or a last minute party invite should be delighted to learn that there’s now a ‘lite’ version of the social networking website.

Designed for accessing the site via mobile phones on slow connections, FaceBook users simply have to point their phone browser at http://m.facebook.com and log in as usual.

Once they’ve done the password business, the user is presented with a cut down, text-only version of the site that still retains all the, err, vital functionality, like the ability to poke people, view and write notes, read messages, see upcoming events etc.

We tried it out on our trusty Treo 650 and it was as fast as you like, so we can see it becoming a big hit with teens with even low end phones (so long as they have a browser of some sort, of course).

Shame that MySpace – still the clunkiest social networking site on the planet – can’t get it together to provide a similar simple, free and easy way for everyone to check their homepages without having to download Big Bertha sized pages.

Some mobile surfing faves

Thanks to T-Mobile’s unlimited Web’n’Walk data deal, we tend to access the web a lot when we’re out and about. Here’s some of our favourite ‘lite’ websites:

wunderground.com and /pda.metcheck.com for weather updates, Google reader for keeping up to date with RSS feeds, BBC Mobile for news and hopeful enquiries about Cardiff City’s latest scores, /wap.ebay.com
for making extravagant bids when we’re in the pub and pda.en.wapedia.org for helping settle drunken arguments.

Another way to speed up mobile browsing is to go through web portals like Mobileleap – this handy service snappily compresses and reformats pie-scoffing, lardy websites to slim little whisps o’things that virtually sail down to your pint-sized screen. It’s free at the moment too, although there’s seems to be a bit of a background rumble on theor site about possible future pricing.