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The more established IM services like AIM, MSN, or Gtalk already let you chat on your phone or desktop (or on someone else's desktop, from a browser!). Facebook's chat is just a less reliable clone of many existing products. It gets even less reliable if you connect to it over XMPP.

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Reliability doesn't matter. What matters is who's using what. If all my friends are on AIM, then I'll be on AIM. But they're not, everyone's on Facebook, and uses txt/whatsapp/bbm when they're away from their computer. What I am saying is that I would like to see Facebook become the universal communication method between my friends and me.

But when it does become the universal method, reliability starts to matter.

You're right, I should have said that at the moment, reliability is not directly critical for the success of the service.

However, I do not have any issues with the reliability of Facebook chat. Not to say that there are no issues, they just haven't affected me ...yet.

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