Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home

This week, Facebook began slowly rolling out an update to their site that will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed.  Ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Chat has arrived.

The upgrade hasn’t been applied to my account yet, and so this isn’t going to be an actual review of the new feature (though I’ve been reading about it and think I’ve got it pretty much figured out).  Rather, I just wanted to share some thoughts about how this is going to affect change revolutionize the social networking experience.

If you don’t count e-mail, instant messaging (I’ll refer to it as chatting for simplicity’s sake) was actually probably the first experience you ever had with online social networking.  Your buddy list was your first social graph.  It was the first time that you could connect and communicate with friends online.  It was the first time you could see how someone presented their online identity through their “profiles”, and the first time you could detect their online presence and know their ”status” through their away messages.  It is only natural, then, that the first generation of social networking is being reintegrated into the mainstream offerings.

Facebook Chat is not just another Facebook “application,” but indeed fully integrates into the social graph nature of the service.  You do not add, delete, or rename contacts: all of your friends on Facebook are automatically “chatable.”  If a friend you are actively chatting with adds content (like uploading photos, or writing on someone’s wall) or builds his or her social graph (adds or removes friends), a Mini-Feed like notification will appear in the conversation itself.  Privacy settings allow you to customize or disable that feature.

You can, of course, log off of Chat if you don’t want to be disturbed… but as far as I can tell, there is no invisibility feature.  If you don’t want to speak with specific people, it looks like you’ll either have to ignore them or block them entirely.

As you can imagine though, Facebook has bigger plans for Chat.  At its launch, it will act as a real-time notification service.  If someone sends you an old-school message, pokes you, tags you in a photo, etc. — all of those updates will appear, from what I understand, as a notification emanating from your Chat bar in real-time.

This is but one example of how Facebook wants to turn your asynchronous social networking experience into a synchronous one.  By being able to instantly notify you of changes in and updates to your social graph, they give you the feeling that you are actively engaging and interacting with your friends.  Your graph is no longer a snapshot, but a moving, fluid web of connections and content.  Of course, by giving you that feeling they also want to attract you to stay online longer to see more ads.  Genius.

The initial offering of Chat is just the first step in what will be a long series of upgrades to Facebook.  I project that within a year, Facebook will find a way to not only provide a real-time social networking experience within Facebook, but will start to allow you to take that experience outside the walled garden of their website.  TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington wrote last week about the future of social networking in mobile devices.  His vision:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

Mike writes about applications being built by shadow companies that will leverage the unique nature of the iPhone’s hardware to build a mobile social network.  He says Facebook doesn’t seem interested right now, but I think that’s BS.  Facebook built the first legitimately functional iPhone web application, and you can bet they’ll be in line to build a fully-functional, locationally- and socially- aware native application.

I may have wandered a little off-topic there, but I believe Facebook Chat is the first step in a slow revolution in social networking as we know it.  The graph is going real-time on the web, and it will soon become real-time in our pockets.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user davemc500hats.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like

• "Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless", posted by Jarred on July 1, 2008
• "Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots", posted by Jarred on May 12, 2008
• "iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation", posted by Jarred on April 24, 2008
• "Invisibility: A Violation of the Social (Networking) Contract?", posted by Jarred on February 25, 2008
• "Who Owns the Social Graph?", posted by Jarred on January 5, 2008