A new social side of Facebook
Facebook has long been the “up and coming” social network, especially popular with college and web folk alike. As a direct competitor to MySpace, they have pretty much stayed at #2 in traffic (according to Alexa). Facebook needed that extra edge, something to push it over the top. I think the time has come with Facebook’s new features: integrated chat.
Here’s why its good
A large portion of my friends do have Facebook. I personally also love to chat on Google Talk. Put two and two together and an issue arises: How to get my friends from Facebook on GTalk? I have converted a dozen or so friends with my fanatical persuasion skills, but there are many friends that I just don’t wish to put forth the effort to chat with. I mean it’d be nice if one day they added me on GTalk and we started chatting it up, but its not something I’m going to go out of my way to do. I think many people face these same issues regardless of chat network preference. With an integrated client in Facebook, this immediately alleviates the problem. It also has a very GTalk-ish feel, so its something many web chatters are used to. Best of all, its just there. There isn’t anywhere to sign up or anything to download. It works straight out of the box as soon as you sign on. I can guarantee 100% of my friends will have access to it as soon as they sign on. The only other network that can make that guarantee is Gmail, but is that really considered a social network?
And now, any bad points?
First and foremost, privacy is always a concern. Fortunately, Facebook is smart enough to take that into consideration by employing an opt-out strategy for chat access. Since I think GTalk and FTalk (yeah, I’ll dub it that for now) are near-directly comparative, I would have liked to of seen chat logging. If you’re anything like me, you get a ton of links sent to you via chat daily. While I try to bookmark or save every address I like or want to refer to later, I do tend to miss some (a ton). Chat logs have been a blessing to go back and get the information I need. I’m sure everyone has run into this scenario at least once in their online career. Facebook, being socially active and aware as it is, is somewhat dumb for not having this feature available. Seriously guys, non-logging was so 2003!
My final complaint with FTalk is the exclusivity property applied. You can either talk with all your friends, or none of them. I’m not nieve. I know all chat networks implement this type of a policy, but Facebook isn’t your typical chat network. I would really appreciate a method to appear offline for certain individuals and online to others. Sort of like a seperation of personal and work life? Close friends and acquantances? Maybe thats too much to ask for at this point in our technological evolution, but it is definitely something they should consider to further seperate their brand from others.
Overall?
All in all, its great to see Facebook taking another step forward. I haven’t agreed with everything they’ve done in the past but this idea is stellar. Kudos.
Tags: chat, chat network, facebook, facebook.com, integrated chat, network, news, social, social network, tech, technology
