This week in social media, Facebook announced Facebook Lite for Android, Pinterest and Instagram find themselves competing in ecommerce and ads, and Snapchat hired the former head of The Onion.

 It's time for Social Media Sunday!

Facebook

Launching Facebook Lite

Facebook has an app for fast smartphones. It's called Facebook, and it's accompanied by a growing collection of secondary apps like Messenger, Rooms, and Paper.

But Facebook also has "Facebook for Every Phone" an app for feature phones, intended to reach the newest users in developing countries, along with Internet.org, which largely does the same thing.

Now Facebook has an app for the middle ground between high-tech, high-data users and those who can't get smartphones yet, and it launched this week.

Facebook Lite is meant for markets where Android smartphones dominate, but where the most common connection remains around 2G speeds. That means fast-growing Asia.

It's been under development for over a year, according to Wired, with efforts focused on leaving the Facebook interface as unchanged as possible, while trimming the amount of data transfer and storage required for users.

Interestingly, one of the more overt differences is that Facebook Lite reincorporates Messenger again -- something that some first-world users might find attractive. Another bonus, Facebook managed to make Facebook Lite cost less than one megabyte of storage.

Fixed: Facebook Messenger's Location Problem

Last week, we reported on how a developer figured out how to use the fact that Facebook Messenger tracks location by default to create an app that creeps on friends' locations.

That Messenger had the location-tracking setting by default is customer-unfriendly enough, but add that to the fact that Facebook basically forced users to download and migrate to Messenger, and it caused some outcry.

No worries now, Facebookers. Messenger no longer tracks your location by default, as of Friday, according to Forbes. You can still share your location, but it's now by choice.

Pinterest vs Instagram?

This week, Facebook's wildly popular photo sharing network Instagram and up-and-coming image clipping platform Pinterest found themselves in a battle for advertisers and ecommerce by coincidence: Both companies launched their versions of buy/shop buttons on Tuesday. 

But the coincidental launch illustrates the difference between Facebook-style advertising and ecommerce, and Pinterest's unique qualities. According to AdWeek, Pinterest's "Buyable Pins" may have an edge over powerhouse Instagram -- which launched a "Shop Now" ad button -- when it comes to driving sales.

It comes down to Pinterest's core, which is strong on the female demographic who find it to be a tool for planning purchases -- whereas Instagram is just a giant platform for sending and looking at images in general.

The big drawback? Retailers have to add the buy button to their own page, rather than being rolled out by the company, which is how Instagram's ad-based feature is hitting that network. The other difference, of course, is that Instagram's giant trove of user data and Facebook-backed algorithms are hard to beat when it comes to serving relevant content on a targeted basis.

Snapchat

Hires Onion President as Head of Original Content

Snapchat is definitely serious about moving into making media, rather than just serving it from end-to-end. According to Business Insider, this week the valuable startup hired Sean Mills to be Head of Original Content at the company's New York City office.

Mills was behind several highly successful online and video startups, most notably The Onion, where as president he grew the satirical newspaper's readership to nearly 10 million.