Facebook Chat

As I’m sure some of you noticed, this past week, Facebook launched Facebook chat, a real time instant messenger integrated directly into the site, providing a toolbar-like access point located at the bottom of the user’s browser window:
Inside Facebook, CNN report.

The CNN article in particular includes some informal 'commentary and analysis' by a Stanford grad student, who offers:

"[Facebook Chat] looks like it's going to be an interesting and useful feature," said Josh Pasek, a graduate student in political communication at Stanford University. "My bet is that this will surpass [Google's] GChat as No. 2 behind AIM, because it's so universally used and logged into."

Although pure conjecture, I think this sounds plausible for several reasons. For one, facebook users already have their network of friends ready-made for them. And while gchat does automatically add fellow g-mail contacts to their users' contact list, it seems likely that the friend list provided by Facebook will be a more comprehensive and representative sample of those people the use would want to chat with 1-on-1 in real time. Additionally, although Facebook did previously allow users to access AIM contacts through Facebook connections, the fully integrated instant messenger makes chat with Facebook contacts a seemless and less click-costly experience, while also not limiting users to messaging only their friends who have AIM. And although MySpace also has an instant messaging feature, Facebook's standardized design, network-based friend lists, and easily accessed chat feature make this product much more on par with gchatl than MySpace's no frills option.

Facebook is also attempting to integrate it's mini-feed option into the chat experience, insidefacebook reports:

With the launch of chat, Facebook has moved the access point to notifications from the top of the right rail of the home page to the Chat Bar. Facebook is also pulling other features from the site “into the real-time chat world.” For example, your Mini-Feed stories by default appear in chat windows. This means if you’re playing a game and chatting at the same time, your friends will know.

It seems as if Facebook may be attempting to increase the value and scope of it's "Social Ads" feature, an advertising option it offers to allow advertisers to leverage social connections and integrate ads into mini-feed updates about friends' activities. By incorporating feed updates into the chat experience itself, they may have developed a unique way to target ads to instant message users. This seems like a potentially lucrative direction, as the chat experience is necessarily active (whereas facebook perusing can range from intensely involved to almost entirely passive).