Facebook Opens Up Chat For All. No Converts Here (Yet)
Approximately one year ago I thought I was done with Web chat.
I’d moved on to social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and had begun to associate instant messaging more with my social-drama-filled adolescence than new and (hopefully) professional adulthood. But then it slowly began to creep back in…
First I graduated from university and started using Google’s Gmail chat to keep up with the international adventures and job hunting travails of my classmates. I was then converted to iChat as another means of communication by my co-workers, and finally caved to Windows Live Messenger– the chat vehicle of choice for my PC-loyalist parents and siblings.
And now Facebook presents another option. Early this month, it was announced on the Facebook blog that an instant-messaging application would slowly be rolling out across networks. A couple of weeks later, the small and supposedly inconspicuous widget appeared at the bottom of the screen– although I have yet to activate it.
Sure, it’s simple, collapsible, unobtrusive and arguably valuable– serving to make communication even easier among Facebook addicts, but do I really have any need for it? Yes, I use Twitter, and one could argue I don’t have much use for that either, but Facebook chat seems at this point entirely superfluous.
As yet another distraction, I’m sure it will slowly gain in popularity over time much like other recent (and initially criticized) Facebook updates like the mini-feed and news-feed.
For now, however, I am content to stay away — we’ll see how long I hold out.
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Austin Chu
Posted on May 5th, 2008 at 12:58 pm.
I personally love it. It’s a great way to contact people random people I normally don’t talk to. I’m still all about GoogleChat and iChat. Twitter is growing on me.