I made the mistake of leaving Facebook open on my desktop as I stepped out for the evening on Tuesday night. I returned to a complete mess of Facebook Chat messages. Some users got access to Facebook Chat as early as April 6.
Others trickled in over the following two weeks. But in the last hour a mass of users (all the rest, as far as I can tell) is reporting seeing it for the first time.
I have a policy of accepting all friend requests on Facebook (although I am quickly reaching the 5,000 friend limit). Apparently a significant number of my friends decided to test Facebook Chat as it went live with yours truly. I’m trying to respond to the messages, but a response seems to lead inevitably to a conversation, and having 25 of those at once is a little challenging. Meanwhile, eight more pop in.
Settle down, Facebook friends, and don’t be offended if I’m not jumping right in to the conversation. Except the guy who said his dad is an investment banker for Yahoo - please keep sending those messages.
Information overflow is dead. Long live communication overload.
Okay, I just got a little fright seeing my picture on TechCrunch.
You kind of proved my point by replying to yourself
FB chat just went live for me here in Oz and I can see it becoming a problem already……;-)
I’ve turned it off. I’m not on FB often enough and I keep missing messages. If someone needs to get in touch urgently, there are plenty of other methods.
Piers - like facebook messaging, for example? it’s the perfect asynchronous alternative to FB chat when you have to step away from the computer to use the bathroom, or eat.
Get some sleep, my friend.
You eat away from the computer? Amateur.
I wondered myself, i could not see anything in Techcrunch feeds in my reader, while i was chatting in Facebook, just about an hour ago. OK, no problem, this time you lost! hahaha
Mike you need to go to bed. Or is that the secret to all the juicy bits of information you keep getting?
Does Silicon Valley like to make announcements when everyone is sleeping?
Was that your first seesmic on TC? you dont seem kind of video chat person.. but, nice to see you trying to fit in…may we will all try to with time. Seems like a good idea…certainly a step forward to twitter…I am also enjoying Loic with this.
Does anyone know if the chats are stored in Facebook memory? Are they like private messages?
Within 5 minutes of having Facebook Chat open, I had about 10 conversations on the go - something tells me that I’ll be leaving myself offline in future - I just find it really intrusive which is the opposite of what Facebook used to represent to me.
By using the Facebook friends list feature you should be able to limit which group of friends can see you’re online. Problem solved.
I personally don’t use Facebook Chat enough because a lot of my friends continue to use AIM or iChat, however there are a few features I would like to see:
1. A notification system! With tabbed browsing and multiple windows I often have no clue that someone is using Facebook Chat. Sounds, flashing .. something
2. More promotion. Despite my friends using Facebook almost every day I’ve chatted with two other people. When I asked around via IM there were few people aware of the service.
ok mike.. so you are popular.. big deal!!
Well, Mike, that’s what you get for being desperate enough to friend the entire Internet.
Seriously, I actually lose respect for people who friend people like you. It makes them look desperate to look connected to supposedly important people.
For some reason I still find email and Adium to be a better way to communicate than Facebook’s system, and most of the friends I want to talk to are on Facebook. It could be because I don’t have time to talk to them often. It’s more likely due to the fact that I have many friends I don’t actually know, so Facebook to me has little value - my friend feed is usually full of information I don’t want to see. I suppose if I filtered my friend list down to actual friends I’d find messaging and chatting useful, but since email and IM already work well for that use case, what’s the advantage? Obviously for you, Mike, there is a big advantage given you communicate daily with lots of people you don’t know personally, but given the nature of your post it may be eventually require you to be invisible or filter who can chat with you as well (if they offer those features).
The biggest issue I see is that you have to explicitly log out of Facebook or go offline with chat. If you just close the browser window, you will still be online and be open to 100’s of messages like Mike was when you return to visit the site later in the day.
Lot’s of dudes chatting…sweet!
Facebook chat isn’t supposed to replace any of your other IM or communications tools. It’s just a nice little way to message your FB friends inline. Quit comparing it to other services.
I first heard about FB chat from your online musings when you received a pre-release version. Glad to receive your feedback. Face it Michael, you’re just too popular! keep up the good work..
Michael - sorry but I think this serves you right for allowing people you don’t actually know to be your Facebook ‘friends’. Set up a brand/fan page if you have people that want to follow you, instead of messing up the social graph.
i finally saw the chat thing yesterday.
awesomely enough all the IMs I got were from people who know my AOL & Yahoo IM info. these are the same people who send me facebook messages instead of emailing me.
seems like some people just get off on having a new way to do the same old shit they’ve been doing for years…
Thanks for covering my name out! I wasn’t expecting a response anyway
Facebook should institute an invisibility setting where you can still be “online” on chat but without showing up as online. That way, you can message people without getting harassed.
awesome because i am a bottom!
The world needs another proprietary closed IM network like it needs another botnet. I’m not using Facebook Chat.
i can’t believe that mike didn’t facebook chat with me… thinks he’s soo cool