Facebook Herald

The chat feature has been live on Facebook since the 6th of April for some people but it seems like today it has achieved full penetration. You may have noticed this nice non-intrusive aluminum brushed bar at the bottom of your screen that could only look sleeker if it had rounded corners. The bar is pretty long, almost touching both sides of the screen but only the far right side is being used by the chat features, that probably means that we can look forward to other features that will persist from page to page as we navigate Facebook.

There are three sections to the current set up. From left to right, the longest shows how many friends are on-line. Clicking that sprouts a small window above it that shows a thumbnail of your friends profile picture, their name and status if they have one posted on their profile, and a little dot to indicate their status; green for available and a moon if they have been idle for some time. The next rectangle has a little icon of a post with a sign on it and the number of new notifications you have will appear on it. I had seven before I opened it, mostly Haikoo Zoo notifications and a friend acceptance. The last icon is a shadow of a little person with a dot next to it and contains your chat options.

It allows you to update your status from there but I have been able to do to a transport error every time. Weak. A button to go off-line so you do not show as available for chat. Using the “pop out chat” option will bring your chats up into their own window, with the chat on the left with profile picture thumbnails, and the right panes showing your status, your current conversation, and what friends are on-line. The neat this about this is that you can pop out the chat window and then close it and you don’t loose any of the information. Anything you type while it’s off the bar shows up on the bar sprout as well. Other than a self explanatory Help link there is a Settings link which opens up your options to change whether or not mini-feed stories appear in real time in your chat window, toggle whether your on-line friends stay open when you click to talk to another person or if they minimize, and the option to show only the names, and not the profile picture thumbnail of your friends. You can also, once again, choose to make yourself unavailable for chat, or attempt to change your status and get another transport error.

A clarification on the transport error. I have three instances of Facebook open at the moment, my page, the Facebook Blog, and a friends profile. It appears that I can change my status from the chat bar while viewing either my page or my friend’s profile, but I can not from the Facebook Blog even though I have access to the bar and other chat features there. This should be normalized across all Facebook pages that show the bar to prevent confusion.

Two more features that are small but pretty neat. The chat is spell checked as you type if you are running Firefox. I say “if you are running Firefox” because I don’t know if it is a function of the chat app or the browser. The second feature is that if you have multiple websites open in tabs; say you are writing this article and talking to a friend on Facebook, the all tabbed instances of Facebook will flash “new message from <friend name>”.

What it currently does not allow is chat rooming. Allow chats are one to one among people who are already friends. To keep it that way, among friends, and have a chat room there would have to be a filter that allows only people who are mutual friends. Facebook can already show us what friends we have in common with some one else, so this feature may not be that far off. I have no interest in chatting with people I have not already friended, I got over that in 1998. The chat also currently saves your chats in a log for you. You can clear the log, but you can not export it to another place to be saved. But I am also fine with that, as I do not need people have constant access to what I said. If I need to remember something we talked about, there is pen and paper, Google Docs/Calender etc.

What we have here is an expansion of the way Facebook allows us to communicate with our friends. The Inbox and the Wall are great but the chat brings us into the realm of real time communication. We can be sure that there will be more features to follow, I don’t know what they are, but I am going to throw out a prediction of Video Chat. Looking for added functionality in the future.

A special thank you to my friend Brianne for helping test the chat features and giving me permission to use part of our chat in screen shots.

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Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Features, News