Image via WikipediaSocial Chat application connects the user to a server. This server provides the user the group of people in a room. This is a good way to connect different people of different communities and different ideology. KickApps, which powers facebook, provides Userplane to enable their users to add chat and instant messaging. Users of facebook can access chat and IM. Users can enable the functionality from the affiliate center by checking the Chat/IM box.

Chat then appears in the top navigation. The IM pops up. Extending the Facebook platform, Social.IM turns user

Ubersoft has launched a new Facebook application

Blackboard has launched their own application which is as robust as the Coursefeed application. Blackboard lets students share information with each other (and professors) in an online manner. It’s usually informational updates, class notes, slides, assignments, discussions and messages to the professor.

This is a free application, for students who elect to use it, allows them access to information only from courses they are registered in, and that information cannot be shared. Schools that license Blackboard’s platform, however, can choose to block the Facebook application entirely.Students can have a new assignment posted to one of their courses? Now they can read about it within Facebook. User will receive a notification with a link to the corresponding page within Blackboard.

User can also navigate through all the top level information pertaining to each course. This includes links to the profiles of other course mates. The application appears to be well built aside from a Java error that I received when entering false information into the fields. This is really amazing !Since the Students are increasingly demanding cutting-edge tools to communicate and collaborate online, and Blackboard Sync can be prove to be a part of the  effort to meet that demand. Quarterly earnings at Blackboard, announced May 7, sunk to a loss of $3.3 million, or $0.11 per share, in the first quarter 2008. Blackboard attributed the loss to rising costs and receivables, as well as the company’s recent acquisition of The NTI Group Inc. However, both earnings and sales outpaced management’s expectations, with revenue growing 24 percent year-over-year to $68.5 million.

Blackboard shares were up Wednesday 46 cents to $36.63 in afternoon trading. Blackboard Sync is available for students attending institutions using the Blackboard Learning System, version 7.1 and higher. If the user’s institution is using a version of Blackboard not supported by Blackboard Sync, or if the institution has blocked the application, user will receive an error message ,when the user will try to install Blackboard Sync. The student can talk to the Blackboard System Administrator on campus if this occurs.With the Facebook application, all of this information comes in the form of a news feed, letting user to keep track of the courses.

The application is connected directly with the actual Blackboard account at school, so there’s not much extra work user need to do, like re-entering data for use on Facebook. CourseFeed’s Facebook application is currently only available at a select number of schools, but more will be available in the future,which is going to change the education system a lot.

Recently Facebook has announced Facebook Connect, which will allow the company’s almost 70 million users to port their identity and friends list securely to other Web sites. This can be seen as an answer to the MySpace unveiled Data Availability, which allows users to move data to eBay, Yahoo, Twitter and Photobucket, and a couple days before Google will announce its own data portability move. This has been already done just a day before the Facebook announcement. Facebook helps the user to maintain their real identity.

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more. With Facebook Connect, users can also take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. The innovative Developers also will be able to show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. This also maintains the dynamic privacy.

As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that user’ information and privacy rules are always updated. As if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website. Users will have total control of the permissions granted, like whether sites that agree to host Facebook data get to see basic profile information, including users’ pictures, names, friends and photos. Users who make an update to their profile information will see those changes in a partner Web site.

Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

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.

The flood of applications has caused problems in Facebook right from the start. Facebook has repeatedly changed the rules, but always seems one step behind the creative moves by developers to spam their way into gaining new users. Most recently, limits were put in place that limit the number of invitations users could send out. The more people who ignore requests from a particular application, the lower the limit for that app.

Facebook is now a little tired of beating questionable developer tactics away with a stick. So now they will try the carrot approach as well - by rewarding developers who play by the rules and build useful, popular applications.

The new program is being called the Preferred Application Program. It has different rules, like allowing application users to invite more than the normal number of friends per day. But there are an almost unlimited number of other ways that Facebook can promote preferred developers. Preferred apps can show up higher in search, for example. And Facebook can give them a badge or other sign of endorsement that they can add to their application pages.

A more subtle, but possibly more powerful benefit, may be to change the rules on how and when user activities through these applications can show up in the News Feed. Finally, new Facebook users could be presented with a set of default third party applications to add when they create an account, perhaps tailored to their stated interests..

CircleUp, Inc. is announcing the availability of powerful new messaging features on Facebook