Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless

Well, it’s been over two months since Facebook integrated chat into its offerings.  In my preview post, I said that Facebook Chat “will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed” and that it would “revolutionize the social networking experience.”  Harping on the real-time notification feature rolled out with Facebook Chat, I wrote:

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.

Boy, did I have it wrong.

Not once have I engaged in a chat session with any of my friends.  Not once. No one has chatted with me, either.  I have yet to receive a real-time notification, though I suppose on the day that I do happen to be online when someone pokes me… well, that will be nifty, I guess.

Your experience may be different than mine (and I hope you’ll pipe up in the comments if it has been), but the only usefulness I’ve gotten out of Facebook Chat is seeing when people are online.  And that is only mildly interesting.  The only people that I would ever chat with are already in my Google Talk list, and that is open all day through Gmail.  Why would I start a conversation with someone on Facebook?

Have you used Facebook Chat?  If so, is it just eye candy or do you actually find it useful?

P.S.  I did make one correct prediction in that post, though!  In an aside towards the end of the post, I wrote:

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.

On May 9 — less than a month later — Facebook announced Facebook Connect, an authentication and identity-providing tool that lets users port their social graph to the wider web (we covered it here).  So we’ll count that post as just a regular “FAIL”, not an “EPIC FAIL.”  Mmkay?

Image courtesy of the FAIL blog.