Facebook is about to launch a web chat product called Facebook Chat. Users will see a chat bar on the bottom of all Facebook pages, showing which of their friends are online, who they’re chatting with currently, and other controls. Chat will currently be one-to-one only, although there is no limit to the number of chat sessions that can be open at any one time. Conversations are archived, and messages to people who are set to “offline” will be sent to their Facebook inbox instead.This is simply great.
When Facebook first announced its new instant messaging features many were disappointed to discover that the company had opted to use its own, closed chat system rather than an open protocol like Jabber/XMPP.the chat feature is not Jabber compliant, meaning it cannot be accessed outside of Facebook on clients like Trillian or Adium. Also not yet adding API or platform functionality to chat, so third party applications cannot access chat and build on top of it. Just hope this product will be enhanced over time.
The best thing about this feature is Users won’t have to install chat as an addition application; it will automatically show up at the bottom of the screen for everyone and there’s no way to completely remove it, although you can minimize it substantially when not in use. By providing Jabber/xMPP access to developers, Facebook Chat becomes easily extendable and has the opportunity to become a more mainstream IM option. For example, it wouldn’t be hard for Google to integrate Facebook Chat into GTalk, and the same goes for any other multi-protocol chat client that supports Jabber. The new instant messenger application will allow the user to chat with friends wherever he logs on to Facebook; it will be nested at the bottom of browser, ready to access at any time.
Like the GTalk sidebar in GMail and the user can also “pop-out” a chat window for any conversation , allowing user to do other things within Facebook in the browser window while carrying on the conversation unperturbed. User will also be able to receive notifications from the mini-feed and applications if he chooses to, but that is only an option, so the user don’t have to be swamped in application invitations if the user don’t wish for them.