Over the past few years Facebook has seen many changes. You may remember Facebook apps seemed to be the hottest thing around.  But it didn’t take long for all of us to try them…and get burned out! Also during this time Twitter burst onto the scene and taught us conversation was far more important.  Facebook quickly realized that and made more adjustments bringing us the newsfeed we know and love.  The evolution has continued and now brings us a new Lite version of the site and @ status tagging.

Facebook Lite was originally touted as an optimized version of the site for countries with low-bandwidth. However last week over at TechCrunch, Facebook was quoted as saying:

“We decided to roll out Facebook Lite in the U.S. to give users a simple, expedient alternative to facebook.com, and hope that it will fill this need. We have also found that people who are new to Facebook tend to be most interested in a simpler experience, focus on establishing their network of friends and communicating with them by writing on their walls, sending messages, and looking at pictures. We have introduced the Lite site with these new users in mind”.

After taking Lite for a spin, I must admit that I’m very impressed with the simplistic interface.  As you can imagine, the newsfeed is the main aspect of the site.  It’s very clean and easy to interface with. Clearly positioned at the top are status and media sharing tools; followed by birthday and event notifications.

@ Tagging

Now when posting a status update you’ll have the option of tagging your friends in the message…that’s right, just like Twitter. Although Facebook’s implementation works differently, there are obviously similarities starting with the @ symbol.  Once you type “@” a drop-down menu will appear with a dynamic list of your friends and other connections even including groups, events, applications and Pages.

When you reference a friend it will send them a notification and post the status update to their wall. Just like traditional tagging in Facebook, your friend can delete the update from their wall. Also worth noting is that the “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update.

So what does this mean for you and your business?

Well for starters, you’d be better off spending time communicating and engaging your connections than building fancy applications for a page that users may not even visit.  Remember it’s not just Facebook Lite you need to be thinking about, it’s also Facebook mobile.  (Read here: Mobile now connecting 65 million.) You’ll notice that Lite seems to parallel mobile in terms of its feature set…which may become our new reality. Now I’m not telling you to bail on your business page, it will still be assessable. You will still be able to share business updates and engage with users you just might not need those fancy tabs.