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Facebook Chat

Posted April 23rd, 2008 by chrishambly
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Facebook chat will aid in the reduction of publishing on the platform: Discuss

So Facebook rolls out a chat application this morning, I log in to find a list of "online friends" ready as potential victims for me to pounce on for synchronous chat!

I don't know about you, but I do like live chat, I mean hell I've used it as a business platform for about 8 years, chatting with clients and students all over the world, it's always been my office. I remember using Yahoo! extensively with students for 4 years, as our "virtual classroom", and even added away messages like "this is my office knock first", or "I'm in the garden making fireworks", poor attempts and installing a sense of go away I am busy right now.

So I'm comfortable with chat.

Already today I chatted with Jeff, Maz, Daniel, Ben, Matthias, kfir, CJ,

I do prefer though the time one has in email, the reflection time, to ponder and to measure, chat removes that and of course demands immediate attention.

Regardless of how you feel about chat itself, do you think it might actually decrease the amount of publishing on the platform itself? If you can instantly contact and ask a friend something, why would you publish, notes, forums posts and various bits and bobs?

What's your thoughts?

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Comments

saving messages

On April 23rd, 2008 Beth Granter (not verified) says:

Well I wonder if the conversations in Facebook instant messages are stored anywhere so you can look back over them? Or if not, will that be possible at some point? I save all my MSN conversations and I've found that useful in the past.

Could facebook chat undermine news feed

On April 23rd, 2008 Craig Hepburn (not verified) says:

Facebook chat could actually undermine the news feed by allowing the user to communicate in real time. Now i agree that chat and the news feed have completely different purposes but you would be amazed at the number of people i speak with who don't even understand what communications tools they are using and the best practice for purpose on various methods. It will be interesting to see what the impact of the one2many news feed has when users adopt a real time one2one facebook chat option instead.

An example i have just experienced this morning - so here is the scenario.... Im looking to hook up with my friend Carl in the next couple of weeks so i would normally post a message on his wall and wait for his response, now the key here is that all our common friends will see we are meeting up and join us - but with facebook chat i might now use facebook messaging instead meaning the information does not get viewed by the many. I also agree that people already use MSN, SKYPE, google talk and other IM technology in conjunction with facebook but by having this feature plugged in to the site i believe it will have a fundamental change in user behaviour. It will be very interesting to watch over the coming weeks and i will keep you all posted.

Read the full post at: could-facebook-chat-undermine-news-feed

Craig

Chat

On April 27th, 2008 Asha (not verified) says:

I agree with you it does not give you time to ponder/think like with emails, you feel quite rushed because it is so instant. I'm guessing alot of it depends how quickly you want to know something in which case it would make sense to use chat, but not everyone will be online at the same time so you would still publish and post..
Will be interesting to see going forward.. :-)

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