Depending on who you listen to the Facebook Lite offering that was inadvertently sent to many Facebook users is everything from a direct frontal assault on Twitter to a speed enhancer. Since this product was not even supposed to be released as it was it may not really matter what it really is because it’s not really ready to even ‘be’ quite yet. Two takes came from Mashable and TechCrunch and they are very different.

Mashable’s take can be summed up as follows

It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitterstream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.

Everyone wants to figure out who has this social media thing figured out. One of the things that gets attention in a hyper covered area like social media is saying something contrary to what appears to be the conventional wisdom. In the UK, we have heard from 15 year ‘analysts’ and now we hear from the UK media regulator, Ofcom that social networking use is down. The Ofcom site defines them as the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services. Their findings as reported by ClickZ states

One of the more difficult aspects of Facebook up until yesterday was the search capability on the site. Yesterday was a busy day at Facebook as the “FaceFeed” acquisition was put in motion .Under the radar of sorts was this announcement about improvements made in the search capabilities that helps heavy Facebook users considerably and, in particular, marketers.

Let’s be honest here. Facebook is like every other social networking / media / engineering marketing site in that it promotes communication and a kind of online hippy mentality. It’s all peace, love, everyone getting along and basically knowing way too much about each other. Well folks, let’s remind ourselves of one thing about the lovable hippies of the 60’s. They went on to become major league capitalists (the ones that could at least feed themselves like Jerry Rubin) and while Facebook may always talk about the user experience what they are most interested in their financial experience. At the end of the day it’s a business and who can fault them? The search capabilities help the business of Facebook even more and may help them hit those lofty revenue numbers.

Google has given the good folks who use their Australian engine some social networking features that come with a gaggle of Google gadgets. Looks like the only way to get the social networking aspects of the gadgets is to be putting your shrimp on the barbie. Smart Company tells us

The new gadgets include the “Updates” feed, which is similar to those seen on the Facebook home page. Other gadgets include news.com.au, Biggest Brain, YouTube, Photos, Chess, Flood-It!, NY Times Crossword, To Do, Go Comics, Trivia, Timeline, and Tile Game.

Users outside of Australia can use the gadgets, but only Australians can use their social features. Regan also said in his post that the social features are completely optional.

Since we had a rather strong response to our coverage of the United States Marine Corps’ policy to not allow Marines to access social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter on the Marines’ network it seemed appropriate to see how this is handled ‘across the pond’.

Now before going into this and making comparisons between the two reports I think it only fair to share a comment from one of our readers to the report regarding the USMC policy. Commenter Jason said

This ban has slowly been implemented across all Department of Defense systems. This is not just a Marine ban. This is strictly for government systems and in no way affects the systems used for morale. They are not saying the Marines cannot access Facebook or MySpace or Twitter on their time. They are saying that Marines cannot access these Social Networking sites while at work.