Just yesterday I told you about Facebook’s new mobile site, Facebook Zero, that allows users to browse Facebook from their mobile phone without being charge for the data they use.

In my post I speculated that MTN may be the first operator to offer this service in South Africa and guess what? This morning upon logging in to my Facebook account I noticed an announcement on the right hand side of the page.

The announcement, captured in the screenshot, clearly states that you can go to http://0.facebook.com to use Facebook Mobile without being charged for the data. It also states that it is currently only available on MTN.

As I am on MTN I quickly added my cellphone number and clicked the button to send the link to my phone. It arrived but upon opening up the link I was greeted with a 500 internal server error. Yesterday when I tried it I was redirected to a page telling me Facebook Zero is not supported by my operator.

Clearly something has changed overnight and it is looking positive for South African MTN users, maybe they just need to iron out a few bugs before MTN users can browse Facebook through Facebook Zero without being charged for it.

Are you on MTN? Give it a try and tell us if it is working for you.

In a continent like Africa most of the people use their mobile phones to access the internet, but one problem most of us face is the expensive data charges that goes along with that.

Enter Facebook Zero, Facebook Zero is a new mobile site like m.facebook.com with all the same key features but more optimised for speed.

What makes Facebook Zero so special? The fact that it is free, that’s correct no data charges if you browse Facebook Zero. Initially it will only be available through 50 mobile operators in 45 countries, currently South Africa is not on that list. Good news however is that MTN will most likely be the first to offer it in South Africa due to them already offering it in other countries like Rwanda, Uganda and Sudan.

Two of the fastest growing areas of technology include Mobile and Social Networking, and Facebook with its already large mobile subscriber base is filling this gap even further by speeding up its service and offering it for free to its customers.

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

• It’s fast: 0.facebook.com includes all the key features of Facebook’s 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, they have 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 Facebook 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

Facebook Zero will initially only be available on the networks in the countries listed below, but there are plans to expand the service to other countries and network operators soon. Vodafone is also in the pipeline so there may also be hope for local Vodacom users.