Facebook rediscovers IM Chat

So Facebook has finally released a synchronous chat service, like oh...IM. Problem is, attached to a Full Service social network with 60m odd users one gets immediately bombarded with lots of people chatting - like various IM services were in the early days when everyone was trying it out. But IM calmed down.

To be sanguine about it therefore, the Facebook service will probably calm down when everyone has told their entire social network that they are in chat mode, and become more usable

We did most of our "heavy lifting" work on social network dynamics about 3 years ago, and to be honest we haven't seen much change in people's behaviours since then - at the time "Chatting" (ie direct interaction between people) - in all its forms - was the killer application on a social network.

This is probably also good for Facebook usage stats - in fact given the collective brainpower they have allegedly amassed, its sort of surprising they have been so slow to the party. They've allowed all sorts of other services to grow into the vacuum.

The other issue they face is platform interoperability - Twitter for example being across mobile and websites, and being fairly open lends itself to a lot of add-on services.

I wonder how Beacon integrates into this service

Update - another surprised user....maybe pull based comms and/or some sort of presence/warning system may be a good idea?