Social.im: chatting with your Facebook friends
Your friends are spread across a bunch of IM networks:
Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, etc.but they are all on Facebook!
Even though it’s not the first of it’s kind, social.im’s alpha release last week of a chat/instant messaging client for Facebook has gotten some good coverage, including by Megan McCarthy on her Wired Blog and Michael Harrington in Techcrunch. This version’s Windows-only; a Mac version, and clients for other networks, are in the works.
I really like the promise of a ‘universal’ client that can connect with my Facebook, Myspace, tribe.net, etc. friends as well as my MSN, Yahoo, and AIM contacts. My initial reaction is that this initial release wouldn’t help me personally in terms of connectivity: I already use multi-protocol IM clients (Adium on the Mac, Trillian on Windows) so while my friends are indeed scattered across networks I can connect with all of them. And a lot of my friends don’t use Facebook because it’s so creepy from a privacy perspective — or just because they don’t like it; so the implication that people aren’t your friends (and maybe don’t even exist) if they’re not on Facebook is really troubling.
Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on, and once they get a Mac client, I’ll check it out …
I was talking about this with a friend of mine in her mid-20s, who commented that her circle of friends spends a lot less time on IM these days — in fact, about 1/3 of them aren’t even active on IM any more. In their world, Facebook has taken over as the replacement communication mechanism. She said that talking with a 15-year-old relative of her, the same’s true in high school circles: people are on Myspace and Facebook much more than IM. So perhaps this is solving a problem that isn’t there …
Comment by Jon — January 17, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
[…] Calore has a few more details on the chat functionality on Wired News, contrasting it with social.im The chat feature is one that hardcore Facebook users have been hoping to see for a while. […]
Pingback by Tales from the Net » Facebook adds new privacy controls, “friends-of-friends” features, chat — March 18, 2008 @ 9:05 pm