Facebook does Instant Messanging (IM)

Dunno if this is a new feature, but Facebook has integrated instant messaging (IM) to folk that are on Facebook. This is like Google doing their Google Talk chats inside GMail. More and more reason why the web browser replaces the traditional desktop application?

Facebook chats
Facebook IM

Do I like being able to only talk to folk that are my friends? Naturally. One wonders though why we have so many different identities, on different services. The one that consolidates them all, is the one that enables ease of use, is the one that will “win”.

Me? I’m old fashioned. I like my IM client. I like my email client. All desktop clients I might add. The kids of today? They’re happy with everything web-based. Besides, the concept of syncing stuff offline is slowly becoming more popular with web-based applications, so maybe eventually, I too might like these new web applications…

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3 Comments

  1. Claudine says:

    Facebook chat doesn’t cooperate with Jabber or allow message logging/history, so I’ll stick with my desktop client for now.

  2. byte says:

    Hi Claudine!

    I guess the whole idea of Facebook chat is to “lock you into Facebook.com”. Why? They can sell you ads. Bombard you with notifications. And keep the “mindshare” within the site itself… More eyeballs, the better, right?

    While you and I might not feel this is cool stuff, in theory, the kids of today, might find this much better than other forms of IM…

    Jabber? Thats still very much limited to “geeks”. Even with GTalk, I seem to have more people on AIM/MSN/Yahoo!

  3. Claudine says:

    Facebook chat doesn't cooperate with Jabber or allow message logging/history, so I'll stick with my desktop client for now.


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