Facebook chat - the potential to unseat other IM services?

[Scott_Arm]

Looks like facebook is rolling out a chat service:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/04/06/facebook-chat-launches-tour-first-impressions/

Does this have potential to steal people away from MSN, AIM and whatever else?

I live in Canada, and apparently our younger population is facebook addicted at a higher rate than most other countries, but I think every single person I'd want to chat with is on my facebook.

If they add facebook chat to Trillian or something using the facebook SDK, I'll be gone from MSN very very quickly. I still dream that one day they'll actually get MSN, AIM, Google Talk and whatever else communicating with eachother.


Edit: Another thought ... will people find facebook chat too intrusive and annoying, thus driving people who hate IM services away from facebook? I'm assuming no, because you'll obviously be able to turn it off. Hopefully you'll have the granularity to enable/disable chat for specific people, or at least groups of people.

 

[Valzic]

Sounds like that new fangled invention -- the telephone...you can chat with you friends with it. It comes full circle.

To your point, I am not sure if it will take over typing or not. In many instances I found great reluctance in engaging in chat in a variety of games. There were people taht you had to drag kicking and screaming to talk, if they did.

Also typing allows more anonymity and also doing it when you should be doing something else like work, school stuff, sleeping etc.

It will catch on in certain groups but not all in my opinion. For me, I am bandwidth limited in Canada. Got the best High-speed I can where I am located (rural - wireless) and I am occasionally affected when I speak on chat. That makes me think that with more and more push to throttling by ISPs, that might temporarily impact full-scale use of that.
:smile:

 

[Arwin]

In the Netherlands, hyves is really popular (e.g. http://avanarum.hyves.nl) . When it started I wasn't very interested and ignored it, but now so many people are on there, and the features are all quite good and easy to use. It seems to be very much filled with just Dutch people though, but I guess that's also an advantage (at least for Dutch people ).

 

[AlphaWolf]

Looks like facebook is rolling out a chat service:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/04/06/facebook-chat-launches-tour-first-impressions/

Does this have potential to steal people away from MSN, AIM and whatever else?

I live in Canada, and apparently our younger population is facebook addicted at a higher rate than most other countries, but I think every single person I'd want to chat with is on my facebook.

If they add facebook chat to Trillian or something using the facebook SDK, I'll be gone from MSN very very quickly. I still dream that one day they'll actually get MSN, AIM, Google Talk and whatever else communicating with eachother.


Edit: Another thought ... will people find facebook chat too intrusive and annoying, thus driving people who hate IM services away from facebook? I'm assuming no, because you'll obviously be able to turn it off. Hopefully you'll have the granularity to enable/disable chat for specific people, or at least groups of people.

Anything as popular as facebook is going to draw in users if they do it (the chat program) right. I personally don't use facebook (I'm also in Canada) but I'm pretty certain I could find ~100 members of my extended family on there at any given time. Not that I want to talk to them.

Are there any numbers for popularity of the various chat programs?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Anything as popular as facebook is going to draw in users if they do it (the chat program) right. I personally don't use facebook (I'm also in Canada) but I'm pretty certain I could find ~100 members of my extended family on there at any given time. Not that I want to talk to them.

Are there any numbers for popularity of the various chat programs?

I think AIM has the must users. I found this link from 2006 on a wikipedia entry ...

http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/general-other-im-news/34413-im-market-share.html

Here's the stats on facebook. They have over 70 million users.

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statisticsl

 

[AlphaWolf]

I think AIM has the must users. I found this link from 2006 on a wikipedia entry ...

http://www.bigblueball.com/forums/general-other-im-news/34413-im-market-share.htm

Here's the stats on facebook. They have over 70 million users.

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statisticsl

Your first link dies (needs to be .html) but I figured it out, but it looks like with a successful buyout MS and AIM will have a pretty even market split although they are missing a couple of the chat progs I'm sure they are much smaller.

The fact that google has only managed to attract less than a million users suggests to me that facebook might be fighting an uphill battle with their own user base. I guess it will depend on the level of integration they manage. Maybe MS will just buy facebook and solve it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Your first link dies (needs to be .html) but I figured it out, but it looks like with a successful buyout MS and AIM will have a pretty even market split although they are missing a couple of the chat progs I'm sure they are much smaller.

The fact that google has only managed to attract less than a million users suggests to me that facebook might be fighting an uphill battle with their own user base. I guess it will depend on the level of integration they manage. Maybe MS will just buy facebook and solve it.

Well, the chat will automatically be available to anyone using facebook as it's all done through AJAX windowing stuff. There will be a little bar at the bottom of the facebook page, kind of like the windows taskbar that shows all the chats you have open etc. They show it in the original link I posted. So it'll be right there for all 70 million facebook users, once the rollout is finished. Myspace has an instant messenger now too, apparently. I saw a plugin for Trillian.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I also didn't realize skype had instant messenging capability and it has a few users .... maybe something like 310 million.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Looks like I have facebook chat. Doesn't seem like you can enable/disable for specific friends or lists of friends. That's kind of crappy.

 

[Valzic]

Do'oh....

I answered thinking "Voice" chat versus instant message chat.

I think Facebook would not steal from other chat services. I live on MSN as I work from home and its my communication tool between myself and my family. Even when we are at home, we use MSN to communicate between computers in our house.

I think if you are a user of chat services AIM, MSN etc you would continue to use what you are comforatble with. However, there are a lot of people that have been introduced to facebook that would NEVER have tried a chat program before. I think Facebook has a good shot of adding those to the chat world.

So there is no control of whom are your "chat' list. I will have to experiment once more peolple realize there is chat and can test.

 

[Scott_Arm]

So there is no control of whom are your "chat' list. I will have to experiment once more peolple realize there is chat and can test.

They are rolling it out slowly, adding so many networks a day. Not sure how long till everyone has it. Maybe everyone does now. No idea. There's a little taskbar on the bottom of your browser window that shows all of your open chats and how many friends you have online. the only option I could see for privacy was online/offline. I tried looking under the application privacy settings, but chat wasn't listed. It would be nice if I could appear online to some friends and not others. I don't have a huge friends list, but for some of the people I know that have 300 friends, it would be a nightmare. So far, none of my friends are showing online, so I haven't been able to test it. You can pop out the taskbar into its own window.

Edit: In the chat help it says they are working on finer granularity for the privacy control.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I signed up for facebook just to get a look at the client.

At this time you cannot prevent a friend from chatting with you on Facebook Chat. We are working on this feature.

So it appears they'll offer it.

I wonder if they will eventually offer integration with other clients.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I signed up for facebook just to get a look at the client.



So it appears they'll offer it.

I wonder if they will eventually offer integration with other clients.

I doubt it. Hopefully they've used Jabber and there's at least a possibility of talking to other Jabber IM services. I've always found it annoying that live messenger, AIM, yahoo etc don't talk to eachother.

I like facebook. It's pretty nice when all of your friends are on it. I don't care so much for posting on people's walls, but it's really handy for sharing photos if you want privacy control, and the events are really handy. I've been to a lot of parties, small concerts etc that were organized using facebook. It's nice to be able to see who else is going and have a nice calendar to keep track of everything for you. It's also good for the organizers because they have a good idea how many people are going to show up, or how much interest there is in something like a concert, where they may choose a venue based on the "attending" response.

If they had a more robust mail function that allowed attachments, I could literally do 99% of the personal communications I need to do through facebook rather than use a separate mail client and IM service.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I doubt it. Hopefully they've used Jabber and there's at least a possibility of talking to other Jabber IM services. I've always found it annoying that live messenger, AIM, yahoo etc don't talk to eachother.

Live messenger and Yim do talk to each other. Yim can also talk to LCS and Lotus Sametime.

I like facebook. It's pretty nice when all of your friends are on it. I don't care so much for posting on people's walls, but it's really handy for sharing photos if you want privacy control, and the events are really handy. I've been to a lot of parties, small concerts etc that were organized using facebook. It's nice to be able to see who else is going and have a nice calendar to keep track of everything for you. It's also good for the organizers because they have a good idea how many people are going to show up, or how much interest there is in something like a concert, where they may choose a venue based on the "attending" response.

If they had a more robust mail function that allowed attachments, I could literally do 99% of the personal communications I need to do through facebook rather than use a separate mail client and IM service.

Facebook isn't really my thing, but I understand how it is attractive to people looking to keep in touch.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Live messenger and Yim do talk to each other. Yim can also talk to LCS and Lotus Sametime.

I did not know that. Guess that's because most of the people I know are on live messenger now, and I ignore everyone else. My ICQ, AIM and maybe YIM accounts have all been collecting dust. I used to run Trillian and I'd be connected to all these different services, but I just got annoyed with it.

I think facebook added IM because Myspace recently added IM. They aren't trying to compete with live messenger so much as steal people away from myspace. I guess the idea is that if myspace offers something they don't have, people will feel attached to that service.

Facebook isn't really my thing, but I understand how it is attractive to people looking to keep in touch.

Some people are definitely too obsessive about it. I originally signed up because I was going on a trip to France and felt it was the best solution to sharing my photos with the people I wanted. I didn't want to drag people individually through a boring slideshow, and it had the privacy control I was looking for. Plus all of the people I wanted to share with were already on facebook. The event thing has been surprisingly useful. I keep track of birthday parties, going away parties, concerts, special events and other get togethers. I'm VERY forgetful, so this has been really handy for me.

This stuff would actually be pretty handy for a gaming clan. You can make a private clan group, have everyone join and then send out events to the group for any important tournaments, matches, practices or whatever, if you're that hardcore about it.

 

[Spaceman-Spiff]

Hmm... another IM system to use...

I currently use:
- msn, because most friends use this
- aim, because some people at work won't use msn :|
- skype, better voice chat system than msn
- google talk, since i used gmail
- steam, for game buddies

and now there's facebook... Probably they will release an app version soon if it ever gets popular enough...

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hmm... another IM system to use...

I currently use:
- msn, because most friends use this
- aim, because some people at work won't use msn :|
- skype, better voice chat system than msn
- google talk, since i used gmail
- steam, for game buddies

and now there's facebook... Probably they will release an app version soon if it ever gets popular enough...

Pretty stupid, huh. Instant messenger isn't a selling point anymore. It's almost mandatory in any program that claims social interaction. So they may as well make all these things talk to eachother.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Still some bugs. I was editing my profile and a chat window popped up. Every time I tried to minimize the chat window I'd get an error about saving my profile changes. The problem was the chat window was blocking where I was trying to type. So I had to minimize the chat and paste my info back into the text box so I could see what I was doing. Seems to work pretty well, though I've been dragged onto facebook for longer than I intended with a few chats.

 

[Valzic]

That is the problem with chats. Having chat in facebook is great idea when its your personal time but if you are elsewhere, sometimes Facebook is not welcome. Having those crazy pictures up is not what you want showing. My daughter loads the craziest photos from her university and I am not sure I would want then visible in a place of employment.

Hopefully Facebook might offer the chat without the actual Facebook as an option. That might encourage the use of their chat instead of others.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That is the problem with chats. Having chat in facebook is great idea when its your personal time but if you are elsewhere, sometimes Facebook is not welcome. Having those crazy pictures up is not what you want showing. My daughter loads the craziest photos from her university and I am not sure I would want then visible in a place of employment.

Hopefully Facebook might offer the chat without the actual Facebook as an option. That might encourage the use of their chat instead of others.

You can put the chat in a separate window. Just load up your facebook, pull the chat window out and then close the original facebook page. It makes a nice little window with your friends list on the right and the chat portion on the left. Seemed a little messed up right now though.