Facebook has been busy with three launches this week:

Facebook Lite

Facebook launched Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of Facebook and you can access it via url lite.facebook.com. Intended for bandwidth limited developing countries, it strips the Facebook to its cores and sans applications. We find the lite version refreshing with its leaner and cleaner layout, and it probably will become our Facebook version of choice looking forward.

@Mentions

Not sure if it is inspired or threatened by Twitter, Facebook has introduced @mentions in status updates. When you type @ with your friend’s name in your status updates, it means a reply to your friend. This allows conversation and is one of Twitter’s strongest feature. Followed closely by recently launched real-time search and FriendFeed acquisition, we sure hope Facebook can have more originality.

Facebook Desktop Notifications for Mac

Facebook has released a Mac native app that when launched will sit on the OS X menu bar. It will alert you when there are new activities on your Facebook. Clicking on the app icon on the menu will drop down a menu where you can access easily update your status, compose message, view list of message in inbox etc. Download the app from Facebook.

Facebook has submitted the latest major revision of its iPhone app to iTunes App Store for review and approval. There are lots of improvement and new features in version 3, check out the video:

Follow Facebook engineer @joehewitt where he twits about the development of the Facebook iPhone app.

David Fincher (“The Game”,”Seven”,”Fight Club”, “Zodiac”, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) is in early talk to direct a yet titled Columbia Pictures movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Producers Scott Rudin, Mike DeLuca, and Kevin Spacey are hoping to get Fincher on board and the film into production by end of the year. The script by Aaron Sorkin (“A Few Good Men”,”The West Wing”) is being kept tightly under wraps, it is said to be printed on hard-to-photocopy red paper. The movie is scheduled to release in 2010.

Here’s the link to the “Untitled Facebook Movie” at imdb.com. There is not much info at imdb.com at the moment since the movie is in early development.

Will the flick be more documentary than drama? Will it have enough plot points to keep the story interesting? Will it reveals secrets or even being controversial? Will Mr Zuckerberg endorse this movie? We will see.

Facebook announced in a blog post that Facebook Usernames will be opened for your choosing starting at 12:01am EDT on Saturday June 13.

Facebook Usernames provides vanity URLs to make it easy for people to visit your profile or Pages on Facebook. Instead of numeric number, your chosen username will form your new Facebook URL.

The username is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Expect a landrush when the service goes live this Friday midnight. Choose your Facebook username at www.facebook.com/username/.

Think carefully about the username you want as you won’t be able to change or transfer it once selected. To prevent abuse and name squatting, Facebook prevents you from choosing a username if you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after June 9 at 3pm EDT.

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop (“.”). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

Check out the Facebook Usernames FAQ.

Get details here if you are managing Facebook Pages.

Inside Facebook has reported that people over 55 are quitting Facebook, citing numbers over the last two 60 day periods. Mark Zuckerberg can still find comfort that Facebook crosses over 60 million monthly users in US, however overall growth for users over 35 is now cooler compared to Feb/Mar period.

However, the number of active users over 55 actually decreased by over 650,000 during this period. In other words, users over 55 who joined the site earlier this year haven’t been coming back as much in April and May, even though the number of active users in every other age bracket has gone up.

We have noticed that usage is down recently for our Facebook friends, but would not attribute it to Facebook’s recent “live stream” interface changes. Getting a large growth rate for new user sign up is one thing, but return rate is the true measure of real worth especially for a social networking site.

Is the drop in return rate a result of its recent interface changes? Is the interface too hard for older people? Is Twitter eating into Facebook’s user base? Is Facebook only cool with kids or is Facebook no longer the hip club it once was? Too many questions but only time will tell if Facebook will become just another AOL.

Facebook has begun rolling out a major redesign of its social networking site this week with a cleaner and less cluttered user interface. The new design will gradually become available to Facebook’s more than 80 million users over few days.

In the new design, Facebook removed the leftmost column that contains the ‘Search’ and ‘Applications’, and moved the search box and applications menu to the main menu on the top. The site content width has also being expanded by about an inch. These two design changes give a less boxed-up feel to the whole site.

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