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Facebook Chat: Yet Another Instant Messaging Application
By Richard Nantel | April 23, 2008
The new Facebook Chat application was installed into my profile when I logged in this morning. I can now chat with any of my Facebook friends who happen to be online and logged in.
That brings the total to three ways I can chat with people through the Web services and software I use on a daily basis:
- Gmail
- Skype
The new Facebook Chat application is bare-bones. Click a little icon to see who’s online, initiate a chat session, type a message, and send. There are no bells and whistles such as file transfers. You can’t add a third person or others to a chat session.
Of everyone at Brandon Hall Research, I was probably the most resistant to using chat in day-to-day work activities. My past experience with IM was that it wasn’t more efficient than e-mail since so many chat sessions turn into long social conversations or brainstorming sessions.
This is going to make me sound square, but I’m slowly coming around to adding a bit of chat in my life. I love being able to see if someone is online, ask a question, get an immediate answer, and move on. Since I want to provide others with this ability, I try to keep logged into Skype and Gmail during the day.
Often, though, the phone starts to ring, the Skype and Gmail chat boxes both pop up, a flood of e-mail comes in, and I just start clicking wildly to set various profiles to “offline.”
I guess you can say I love chat when it gives me what I want but not when I’m providing a service to others. Yes, that’s totally selfish.
I suspect it’s only a question of time before other software I use daily will include proprietary chat features. So, my days will soon be filled with changing the status of my various chat apps to Online, Busy, Away, Offline, Invisible, etc. Perhaps someone will come up with a killer app that changes the status of all of these chat applications with one click of a mouse.
Topics: Learning, Social networking, instant messaging |
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Some how I started acquiring different im programs because of certain friends, relatives, or things with neat spinny things I couldn’t resist. I had acquired AIM, GoogleTalk, Yahoo IM, Windows Live Messenger, Myspace and Skype. It makes me sound like a complete social whore, but I’m really not. I im friends/family on average of 30 min a day total. Some programs let you combine. Skype now lets me chat to Myspace friends, Windows chats with Yahoo, and such, but this limits it by half at most. I came across Pidgin a few months ago and it’s really helped. It juggles all my accounts (save Skype) in one program, lets me know if I have new emails, myspace comments, etc. It’s not the prettiest program, but that why God invented the Minimize button. Skype I use solely for work and Voice/Video calls, and it’s saved me a lot of hassle. I click ‘away’ and it does it for all profiles, or I can change them individually.
It’s programs like Pidgin that make internet life manageable. People on the internet generally have multiple identities, subscriptions, emails, etc. Google seems to be working to handle this, although they too are adding to the problem. Hopefully not to long until there’s a universal tool for emails, calendars, identities, subscriptions, etc. Maybe Google will buy a country and call its citizens Giblets (googlets or googlians would make more sense, but ‘giblets’ is far more entertaining).
April 24th, 2008 at 5:36 am
Adam: Thanks for your comment. Pidgin sounds helpful and Giblets and Googlets sound delicious.
I’m not very optimistic that the situation with multiple logins, identities, chat applications, etc. will change. The current trend continues to be that companies want to lock in their users.