Over the weekend, I noticed Facebook had enabled chat for my account. Apparently, they’re rolling it out slowly to specific networks, so finding someone online to chat with is a bit challenging.
I did manage to have a quick coversation with my college buddy Paul who also works at Oracle in the WebCenter development team.
It’s been a long time since I used Facebook or had much to say about it, and I’m generally underwhelmed by web-based chat. Still, I like the implementation. It’s clean, and the option to pop-out a window is pretty sweet.
While I’m not a huge fan of chatting in a web page, I do admire the design simplicity of the chat app. It’s not intrusive and uses a minimum amount of space. I prefer this to other web page chat widgets I’ve used.
I wish I could add it to Pidgin/Adium, but that will never happen. Aggregating chat is such a yesterday problem. I can’t imagine why I’d want to go back to the bad old way.
Still, I can see this being a runaway feature when it’s fully deployed. Safeguards will be huge though, since chat offers another way for people to spam you. It’s a lot more intrusive than adding someone or ignoring all the vampire requests they send.
Adding to a busy New Web week, Google announced Google App Engine yesterday evening, which will compete directly with Amazon Web Services, one of my favorite topics. Interesting stuff, I’m marinating a post on that.
