Tonight, Facebook announced to a pre-selected group of users the release of “Facebook Lite” in beta. The announcement was made around 11:50pm PST and disappeared shortly thereafter. You can view a screenshot of the announcement here.

The lite site will be available at http://lite.facebook.com, which doesn’t appear to be working at the moment. We’ll be monitoring the twitter-sphere for updates.

Internet companies release lighter versions of their sites to accommodate users who live in areas with lower bandwidth (e.g. India, rural North Dakota, etc.)

But Facebook’s current design seems to be light enough in these areas.

Another explanation is that Facebook is planning to release a real-time streaming product, which makes sense in the light of their recent acquisition of FriendFeed. Real-time streaming pages are typically very heavy.

Update: Some screenshots are beginning to surface. Or, it is possible that the lite version of the site will remain the same, but with optimized code or a different mix of updates on the Facebook Home page.

[photo: Sagolla @ Flickr]