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When I was in high school, almost everyone used AIM. Then Facebook Chat came out and practically crushed it. Why? It wasn't better (it was far, far, worse, actually — you couldn't chat with somebody without one of you complaining about it), but everyone was there. It became the defacto way to reach people. It was successful for the same reason Facebook was successful.

> everyone was there

This is exactly why I turned chat off. I have no desire to be contacted by old high school classmates who happen to be bored and browsing facebook, and see me pop up.

You can set up a friends list, and turn on chat only for that friends list, if you like. Set up the friends list at https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and then click the little settings icon at the bottom right (in the new chat design) and choose "Limit availability...".

With the old chat design, choose chat at the bottom right, then the "Friend lists" menu item in the chat window, and add the friends list you want to affect chat availability, and then turn availability on/off to particular lists.

Useful for parents and work colleagues who don't use other IM or who you don't want to give your personal IM accounts to.

I think this discussion made me realize that I want there to be a minimum barrier to contacting me in a way that requires instant feedback. I don't care who has my e-mail address because I can reply to e-mail on my own time and terms, but I'd rather people have to do a little work to contact me via IM, and I want it to be pretty hard for people to casually call me just to chat.

Yes but people who are bored and browsing Facebook and don't follow technology minute by minute, outnumber people like us by a huge margin. Facebook launching these three (not so new) features just means that its making video calling more accessible to other people, which means its probably going to work for them.

(Personally, I still feel surprised whenever I see anyone even using Facebook chat.)

I use Facebook chat to talk to close friends because sometimes it's more convenient than picking up a phone to talk to someone out of the country. Allows for more random conversations. Having the Skype feature is an added bonus, no one's requiring you to use it. Just because FB chat is more buggy, that doesn't mean the convenience doesn't highly outweigh the disadvantages. Logging into a different chat client would be for chat-only, while FB isn't.

It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.

Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.

Sure, but that's extra work, and the people I'd allow to see my presence generally can reach me in other ways.

Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.

I assume you mean FB lists, as the groups feature is quite different. /pedantic

Oops. Me bad. FB lists it is.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a 10 year gap in your IM technology timeline there. AIM straight to Facebook? Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along?

You may have been one of the few using ICQ and MSN after AIM. ICQ was much earlier in the chronology (we used to play with it when we got bored on IRC) and no one used MSN. :-P

I used all of those - and ICQ was still largely my favorite, if only because it supported offline messages.

I think its largest drawback was using account numbers, instead of allowing alphanumeric vanity names.

Let's not forget the tack-a-tack sound...

MSN was (is?) pretty popular in Latin America. I had 0 "real life" friends on AIM. My few AIM buddies were people I met in games.

Indeed. I don't know about today, but back in 2006 MSN was as popular as AIM and Yahoo! worldwide and particularly strong in certain areas -- there are some countries where it was even a verb ("I'll MSN you"). But then MS changed the name to "Windows Live Messenger", underinvested, and prioritized search instead. Ah well.

is. I was just all over Central and South America, and internet cafes were always full of high school kids, every single screen full of MSN chat windows.

Indeed, here in Argentina MSN is the default chat application.

My understanding is that MSN was/is the most popular IM service most everywhere but the US (because of AIM?) and East Asia (where they have their own regionally popular services, like QQ in China).

I think this is somewhat regional. I'm from Canada, and no one I know uses AIM. MSN seems to be the most common chat program, although Skype is increasing in popularity.

Yea same with me. In Canada we used MSN and when I moved back to the US it was AIM, even though MSN felt like a much better product.

>Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along

I don't know, was you the only person on that service and thus have no-one to talk to?

I think cheap text messaging helped to kill AIM more than Facebook.

When I was in school everyone used MSN and then later when I switched AIM. Still use them, because those people are still there. Have really mostly ignored facebook chat, and fbchat also does not show user status messages.

They've basically just brought facebook chat on par with instant messengers from the 2000s except you have to install something additional for video chat.

IM is always running in the background. Facebook requires going to the website and logging in and monitoring it. And being "available" to a huge swath of people. Not to mention, all of my colleagues and co-workers are on IM. I'm not going to reach out to a colleague to ask about a client via facebook chat and I'm not going to communicate with a client via facebook, instead of IM.

In short, Facebook likely contains everyone you've ever met or dealt with in person or online and "friended" that can potentially chat with you -- IM likely contains only the people you actually need to chat with.

"Everyone is there" is becoming an increasingly poor reason to justify selling your soul to a particular social network (as an individual or a business).

It’s for people who already spend a lot of time on Facebook. They don’t have to bother anymore using dedicated software. Simple as that. You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

He's clearly being purposefully obstructive in his comments. Obviously if you're on FB already then why open Skype, why open an IM client, that's how integration works.

The parent is asking the equivalent of why you'd add maps to google when you have a perfectly good road map out in the car.

Typical parent.

Lol. I should know, I am one.

FB chat has a jabber interface. It can be used by those of us who don't sit on FB all day too. Pretty convenient. Now, I hope they'll get the group chat working via jabber too.

I think you are setting up a false premise here.

There are many people (including me) who have been using the internet for a very very very long time and don't see facebook as the internet even though we use it.

And I can see that I get quite a few sign-ups to my service that way.

Also the problem is not as much whether people use it for traffic generation. The problem is when they only use it for that.

I am actually beginning to consult my clients on how to build their own digital ecosystems so that they don't leave all the value inside the gates of facebook, twitter etc. but rather attempt to get the value transfered back inside their own ecosystem.

Once you start seeing it that way things start to look very different.

I made a longer argument about it here:

http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/

Don't need a Skype login, or need to know anyone's Skype login.

That is a killer integration feature. I wonder how this works...

Skype has an internal login with Facebook feature?

There is some detail in https://www.facebook.com/notes/philip-su/building-video-call... about how the interface between Skype and Facebook works and about the browser plug-in behaviour.

It looks to me like GOOG FB and Apple are trying to get to video calls and own them before the phone companies wake up and realize how valuable their own social graph is. So far the carrier's have had a gold mine and wasted the opportunity.

The carriers would have had to work together to seize the social space. Instead, they'll just charge $15/month for the "Unlimited Social Package"

E.g. http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.Unlimited-Social-Networ...

Yea I was surprised they put the "show most chatty friends in chat list" as a product. That seems like a very small feature. Adding people to group chat? I thought you could already do this, but I don't really use Facebook chat too much. Seems very underwhelming to say the least.

All your friends are on Facebook, so you don't have to search/find them on Skype. N-to-N video communication is now much easier. Default will be to use FB rather than the Skype client, especially once they add voice calls, conference calls, and group video chat.

You are very right about certain groups of people thinking Facebook is the Internet.