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What’s next for Facebook Chat?
April 25th, 2008
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.
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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…
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.