Facebook Chat: it’s love & hate
April 27th, 2008 | by kilps |Right. So yes everybody knows, Facebook Chat has been rolled out to the rest of us not considered worthy of testing it - and it “changes everything”.
Vincent Mayer sure got that one right - and as everyone is busy explaining your Facebook contacts are different from your normal IM contacts. In my own experience I have far more people as friends on Facebook that I only kindof know compared to IM, and this has the potential to change how friendships are built (something I don’t think social networks are getting right at the moment). Of course it’s not just as deep as that - this just makes it easier to organise stuff with people.
This all good and well, then why hate it? It’s the old story of having everything in one place (think Google). It’s not that I have a problem with using Facebook for all these things, but it just makes it so much harder to move to the next big thing. This is why everyone is starting to think data portability and interoperability.
But just making Facebook Chat work with Jabber isn’t going to solve the problem; in the end I’d say we need decentralised social networks along the idea of Open ID (anyone keen?). Until then though, Facebook it is.