Oli's Shanghai Blog

It was just a normal day in cyberspace, when suddenly my Facebook window had a couple of grey buttons at the bottom:

I’d heard that Facebook was testing its chat client across a number of networks…I wonder if China just got added or whether it’s now ‘in the wild’. Either way, I had to click!

Oooh nice little notification window popup, not harming the normal ‘home’ page. It shows your Facebook status just like MSN or Gmail chat shows your status (in grey under the name). By default it is set to ‘offline’, so you just HAVE to click ‘Go Online!’:

Damnnnnnnn nice! All inside the frame, very smooth pop out, all online people at the top and offline or idle people at the bottom. Searching is, as always with Facebook, really slick too.

So I enlisted the help of my good friend CT to test it out…although we both were feeling the pressure of using it for the first time so we made a couple of spelling mistakes :S

Notice the grey bar which now stretches the length of the window, which carries all of your different conversations in (like the windows taskbar does for MSN). Magic. If you have too many chats open (not likely), then it auto hides a few:

It looks like Facebook Notifications have been moved to the bottom right now, next to the chat which seems sensible (and explains why I couldn’t find them yesterday!).

What’s left? Oh yeah…POPOUT! When I clicked on ‘pop-out chat’ I was a bit suprised by the size of the window (click to enlarge):

But it works very nicely, and there’s certainly plenty of space for…well…chatting.

So…it’s here and it’s easy to use and certainly undaunting (which is a major factor that FB had to face to get the ‘casual’ Facebook users onto a chat client). If they haven’t missed the ‘peak’ of Facebook interest (when the casuals were excited about linking up with their old friends from school) then it could be the app which keeps their interest in the medium term, and hurts other web based IMs like Messenger online and Gchat.

File transfer could be an issue which stops them from toppling the client-based MSN/Yahoo/Google chat emoticons, but hey…if you want to send a picture then just link to your Facebook gallery (links work but only if you include the http:// ).

Exciting times! Now where’s the ‘appear offline’ function…

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