Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
As expected, Facebook is beginning to roll out a chat feature. This weekend some users noticed the chat functionality showing up on their Facebook pages. But this appears to be a phased rollout, as many users still don’t have the capability to chat with their Facebook contacts in real time. You know, unless they use a third party service like Social.im or Babuki.
The Facebook chat service appears to be nicely integrated with the site. Users will notice some chat controls at the bottom of their Facebook page letting them know how many users are on the internet. You can pull up a list of your friends and send them messages from any page on the site. If you accidentally close a window, Facebook will keep track of your history and show older messages when you launch a new chat with the same contact. But if you close the page entirely, you’re out of luck since there does not appear to be a way to save your entire chat history.
Honestly, we’re more impressed with third celebration services like Social.im and Babuki which use Facebook’s API to provide a standalone chat client that can be used without keeping Facebook’s web page open in a browser all day. But we get the feeling that plenty of folks will use the official Facebook chat client simply because it’s there and easy to use.
[via Inside Facebook]
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