Many have complained about the facebook chat, while other think it’s just awesome(couldn’t find a link for this post…lol). I don’t really care much about it to feel strongly either way, but do think there might be some serious consequences down the road.
The whole purpose of a social network is to keep in touch with friends(social graph) in an unintrusive way. After you’ve added a friend to your network, it is up to you how much you want to interact in the site. For years(no more than 4), people have created events, wall posts, groups, and even messages to interact with their social graph. These are all “structured data”. They are easily searchable by the community and interactions are opt in, just like email. Email is “trackable” in your home page through feeds(just like an inbox) and responses are asynchronous. This means you answer/interact when you want, in you own time.
With the introduction of Facebook Chat, people no longer have a choice on whether to opt in, since they are getting messages once they log in. What I think will happen is that people might stop using some of the services like wall posts or creating events for small stuff since they can just chat it.
I know I might be exaggerating a bit with the “death of structured data” title and all, but really: do we need another IM protocol? I already have Adium set up to handle 2 Gtalk accounts, MSN, AIM, Yahoo and Bonjour. This is just cruel to users, who are probably already using their IM client/protocol of choice while visiting facebook.
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