Web 2.0 for the Developing World

There are currently more than a quarter-billion Facebook users around the globe, according to the company's PR department, but it's safe to say that the vast majority of mobile Web 2.0 users live in areas of relative wealth. That leaves the majority of the Earth's citizens, lacking truly high-speed connections or the wherewithal to purchase snazzy new smartphones, in the dust.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "philanthropy," but the good folks at Microsoft have created an application called OneApp that runs on slower networks and older cell phones. According to a recent post at TechCrunch, OneApp allows users "running J2ME on their phones with slow processors and not a lot of memory" to use stripped-down versions of other applications (such as Facebook or Twitter) that otherwise hog too much bandwidth.

Instead of putting it all in the palm of your hand, if you happen to have something less than a BlackBerry or iPhone, Microsoft puts the code in the cloud — in other words, its own servers do the heavy lifting while a stripped-down, just-the-necessities chunk of code runs on the phone.

Of course Facebook and Twitter are the obvious darlings of social media, but the app also works in conjunction with Microsoft's own Windows Live Messenger and a number of other news aggregation sites. And while a rice farmer in Malaysia may have no need for Twitter, or real-time stock quotes for that matter, the OneApp team has big plans, according to TechCrunch:

"The plan is to make OneApp available in other parts of the world too, and to expand the apps that run on OneApp. Microsoft notes that developers will be able to write their apps to work with OneApp simply by using JavaScript and XML. There's an SDK that will be available at the end of 2009."

Here's a Microsoft promo of the new app:

So now less-fortunate people can stop talking to their neighbors and bury their heads in their phones all hours of the day, too. Progress? We'll see.

Image courtesy of Microsoft, via its online press release of OneApp