Over five months after quietly rolling out the Facebook Lite application, Facebook has made the application official and expanded its availability. According to the social giant, the application is now available in select Asian markets and will roll-out to parts of Latin America, Africa and Europe in the coming weeks.

Facebook Lite was originally introduced in January this year as a test application for eight markets – Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Looks like the test was successful, thus the company has now decided to make it an official application for the emerging markets, where faster data connections are either not available broadly or tend to be unreliable.

“More than a billion people around the world access Facebook from a range of mobile devices on varying networks. In many areas, networks can be slow and not able to support all the functionality found in Facebook for Android. Facebook Lite was built for these situations, giving people a reliable Facebook experience when bandwidth is at a minimum,” wrote Facebook in a press note.

Less than 1MB in size, the Facebook Lite application is not only quick to install, but is also significantly faster than the main Facebook for Android application, but it does sacrifice the user-interface and select other odd features. The majority of key Facebook functions are available in Facebook Lite.

India is not one of the launch markets for Facebook Lite and there is no word on whether Facebook plans to release the application in the country. If you really want Facebook Lite, you can always sideload the APK.