What’s next for Facebook Chat?
Facebook Chat has enabled quicker communication than was ever before possible on the site. New features unique to Facebook Chat include live notifications, integration of mini-feed events in the message windows, and the ability to maintain state (such as whether conversations are minimized, and which are open). And as a sign that the product is being actively improved, Chat started working today in at least two more browsers – Opera and Firefox 3 beta.
However, the current Chat feature set is still relatively limited. Among the commonly requested features, we have to wonder: which features will be added next?
Some possibilities:
- Chat logging
- Sounds
- Support for an open chat protocol, or another software-based approach
- File transfer
- Ability to disable chat completely, so that it doesn’t show during the Facebook experience at all
- Chat rooms
- Support for mobile clients or browsers
- Integration with the Facebook Platform
- Friend grouping, perhaps by friends list (although duplicates might be annoying)
- Ability to change the order of friends
- Privacy controls, so that you can prevent chatting with certain friends, or blocking for that matter
- Ability to sign on as “invisible” to other users
- Away messages or states, separate from the Facebook Status
If you have any other suggestions, be sure to leave a comment here and let us know.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:58 am
Once the various “text”-based chat utilities will be implemented, then I guess it will be the time for FB chat to show its real, still hidden, social networking power: Voice and Video chatting! ;)
At your closest computer some time in the not too distant future… 8)
Theo
April 25th, 2008 at 4:51 am
jabber support is a must.
April 25th, 2008 at 7:20 am
I think Facebook’s priorities will be heavily influenced by two things: privacy and user retention.
Privacy is what made Facebook so big, and you’re right, the chat really does lack somewhere there. I expect they’ll be on that pretty quickly (just look what happened to Arrington).
I really can’t see them doing things like chat protocols any time soon. It would mean giving up some of the user’s attention time (i.e. page views). It’s a pity, I find the main problem with it is that I have to keep going to a Facebook page to see messages and reply (in fact I made a Firefox plugin to alert me of new messages).
As an app developer, I would be really excited if they did something on the Platform, there are bound to be loads of fantastic things we could do with that!
April 27th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Chat had been working on Firefox 3 beta since at least April 20th (when it was rolled out to my network)
April 28th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
I’ve been waiting for chat to be released for a long time and when it did, it didn’t feel special. Didn’t know what I was expecting in the first place. I love and use meebo to chat with mostly just 2 people and if I only chat with 2 people on all the main services (AIM, MSN, Y!) I doubt I’ll be chatting with anybody on facebook. So I still haven’t got a chance to try it yet.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Add the ability for Facebook apps to send messages and images into the chat stream when a user is engaged in an app and hits a “share” button.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Facebook Chat doesn’t seem to work with Firefox 3 rc 1.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Chat stopped working today for me in firefox 3 RC1, it works fine when I load the page but when it does its auto refresh chat times itself out —- but chat works fine in IE and on my other (non upgraded) computer.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Same here, with Linux. It times out after a minute or so.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Yep, Firefox 3 RC1 doesn’t like FB chat on Vista either… Very dangerous for Firefox’s future if their browser doesn’t work with such popular websites. You’d think they’d test it out first.