Facebook Chat: Facebook Expands its Sphere of Influence
By James • Feb 25th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Facebook
It is impossible to underestimate the impact on contemporary culture that social networking sites have had. It could even be said that the most popular of them, Facebook, has fundamentally changed the way in which friends and acquaintances keep up with each other. Testament to this is the fact that, worldwide, users spend 8 billion minutes on Facebook a day, sending more than a billion on-site messages in the process.
Facebook set to grow
The incredible news is that this sphere of influence that Facebook enjoys is set to grow, with the site following up on their promise to integrate Facebook Chat with multipe instant messaging (IM) clients. This ‘Facebook messaging’ is made possible by the open messaging protocol known as Jabber (XMPP), which is compatible with all leading IM software programs.
Users will never miss messages
- Photo: Pidgin
By synching their Facebook account with their preferred IM client – such as Miranda, Pidgin or iChat – users will be able to access their friends list and receive messages from Facebook friends even when they are not logged onto the site.
This innovation means that users will never miss messages that are sent to them by their Facebook friends, even if for some reason they’ve navigated away from their Facebook account. Users will also be able to customise the friends list that appears in their IM client account, and will still be able to ‘go offline‘ if they so desire. The strict privacy that characterises on-site Facebook Chat will be preserved, and conversations between friends will remain viewable only by them.
Gap between Facebooks and rivals narrows
- Photo: Twitter
The introduction of what is, in effect, ‘Facebook Messenger’, is sure to only widen the gap between rival social networking sites and Facebook. The site’s VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, seems to understand people’s desires to stay connected with one another, and has developed a way for them to do so even when they have had to log out of their Facebook accounts.
