News of Facebook Zero came out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in a keynote speech by Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice-president of user growth, mobile and international expansion.
Palihapitiya made a passing mention of Facebook Zero which is a text-only version of the mobile Facebook service that mobile phone companies can offer free to subscribers.
Facebook users who want the full multimedia experience with photos and video can switch to a paid-for data service. Facebook said the service will launch "in coming weeks".
The service would be a massive boon for Facebook and help drive mobile adoption and daily use of its service as it drives towards hitting its one billion user target.
It would help it possibly head off a challenge from Twitter, which This was a market it has previously been weak in, but the take-up of Twitter via mobile devices is thought to be helping fuel its growth.
Last week it was reported that more than 100 million users are now accessing the social network via their mobiles, doubling the user base in six months. The mobile growth is part of Facebook's wider growth that has helped it double its number of users to 400 million.
Brandee Barker, a spokeswoman for Facebook, told TechCrunch: "Zero is a light-weight version of m.facebook.com that omits data intensive applications like photos. We are discussing it at Mobile World Congress as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage."
The launch of Facebook Zero follows the launch the launch of a simplified alternative of Facebook.com last year called Facebook Lite. At the time the social networking firm said it was similar to the Facebook experience on a mobile phone.
Facebook has also previously said it is working on developing applications for various mobile devices.
The domain zero.facebook.com is already live, but most users will only see the screen above as their carriers do not yet support it.
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