Today, we are launching another way for people to access Facebook anytime, anywhere: 0.facebook.com. 0.facebook.com is a new mobile site that includes all of the key features of Facebook but is optimized for speed. It initially is available through more than 50 mobile operators in 45 countries and territories with zero data charges.

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley recently forecast that the two fastest growing areas of the technology industry are the mobile Internet and social services. At Facebook we’re at the center of these two trends with more than 100 million people actively using Facebook from their mobile device and with more than 200 mobile operators in 80 countries offering and promoting Facebook Mobile.

Yet when using the mobile internet, people around the world face two main challenges—sometimes the experience is too slow to be fun and the cost of data plans and understanding them can be daunting. We have designed 0.facebook.com to help solve these two barriers and we hope that even more people will discover the mobile Internet with Facebook as a result.

Collaborating with operators from around the world, we developed this new mobile site with two main attributes:

• It’s fast: 0.facebook.com includes all the key features of our standard mobile site m.facebook.com. Users can update their status, view their News Feed, like or comment on posts, send and reply to messages, or write on their friends’ Wall just as they do on Facebook.com. Rather than making photos viewable on 0.facebook.com, we put the photos one click away so they don’t slow down the experience. You can still view any photos on Facebook if you want but your regular data fees will apply.
• It’s free: Thanks to the help of mobile operators we collaborated with, people can access 0.facebook.com without any data charges. Using 0.facebook.com is completely free. People will only pay for data charges when they view photos or when they leave 0.facebook.com to browse other mobile sites. When they click to view a photo or browse another mobile site a notification page will appear to confirm that they will be charged if they want to leave 0.facebook.com

We’re launching 0.facebook.com in partnership with more than 50 mobile operators around the world, listed below.

The 0.facebook.com site is only available on the networks of these operators. People can still access Facebook from our standard mobile site m.facebook.com or our mobile site for touch screen mobile devices, touch.facebook.com, under their operator’s standard data charges.

Soon, 0.facebook.com will also be available from the following operators: Telstra in Australia, Movistar in El Salvador, SFR in France, XL in Indonesia, DiGi in Malaysia, Telecom NZ in New Zealand, SMART in the Philippines, Vodafone in Qatar, Digicel in Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, 3 in the UK, and MTN in Cameroon and Guinea Conakry.

Sid, a program manager for Facebook Mobile, is looking forward to connecting with all his friends with zero data charges.