Facebook Zero launched, promoting low bandwidth and zero cost mobile access

Published by Ewan Spence at 22:54 UTC, May 19th 2010

Facebook have announced 0.facebook.com, a specially adapted version of the Facebook Mobile site (m.facebook.com) geared towards an even faster mobile experience, by reducing images on display, and reduced cost to the browsing mobile user. 0.facebook.com is only accessible through certain mobile phone networks (everyone else is pointed to the normal mobile site), but those networks will provide access to Facebook for free.

This is a smart move for everyone. Facebook are going to get more users and visits from mobile devices, and you have to assume with the volumes they’ll get they can get some good advertising rates. It would make sense for the networks to be on a revenue share of these ad clicks, so the bottom line doesn’t suffer unduly with the increased data usage.

And Facebook users can browse the site and interact online without having to worry about the cost at all. Currently there are 53 networks supporting the service. Interestingly there are no US or UK networks in the initial batch, but Three in the UK are marked as “coming soon.”

The full list of networks, and other information, can be found on the Facebook blog.