Image courtesy of Inside Facebook
On Sunday, Facebook made available an implementation of its new chat function. The roll-out has been positively received by those who have it, but most networks are not yet supported — New York not being one of them.

While I clearly haven’t been able to try the new service, from what I can tell, the implementation is unique and potentially useful. As it was previously reported, the implementation doesn’t yet support Jabber, so external clients like Adium and Trillian will be excluded, but the lack of support there seem less like an opposition to the platform and more like a “let’s just get it right first” attitude.

The Facebook blog notes:

…soon you’ll notice our new Chat bar at the bottom of your browser—no installation or assembly required. From this bar you can view your list of online friends and open conversations with any or all of them. There’s no need to setup a “buddy list.” Unlike the Wall or Inbox, the messages are delivered and displayed to your friend as soon as they’re sent, so you should expect a response right away and without any page loading. Of course, Chat has to play nice with the rest of the Facebook experience. You can collapse conversations to get them out of the way, and go offline if you don’t want to use Chat at all. Chat is there when you want it, and tucked away when you don’t.

It seems that the social networks has been burned enough by “great ideas” in the past and is moving forward slowly on this one:

Before we jump head-first into this new real-time approach to Facebook, it’s worth spending some time thinking about privacy. Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there’s a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don’t want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we’ll continue to make sure that you are in control.

That said, the roll out is going to be slow starting, but hopefully the rest of us will soon enough be enjoying the chattering of Facebook friends.

Technorati Tags: Facebook chat, Facebook, instant message

Share this on: