Facebook users engage in many activities such as social updates, gossiping, playing games and even marketing for companies and advertisers to connect with their customers. One of the most useful features of Facebook is the Facebook chatting facility.
One of the best features of the Facebook chat system is that it allows you to chat with your friends without installing any software. There is no need of any kind of installation which a pre-requisite of some of the other major chatting clients. The tradeoff in this case is a limited set of features. For instance, Facebook chat does not allow you to have voice or video chat you are limited to simple, straightforward text-only chat sessions which is enough for most users but for those who want more they will have to look elsewhere. Nevertheless Facebook chat is very flexible and it allows you a great level of privacy. You can choose to appear offline completely and not let anyone know that you are online or you can choose to appear offline to only a group of your friends by adding them to a list and choosing to appear offline to that list only or to a few lists. Furthermore you can chat with a many people at once by using the group chat feature which allows you to chat with all the members of a group who are online at the same time, like a private chat room or a conference chat.
Facebook therefore is one of the best sites to chat for free online. To get started you need to first create your profiles on Facebook and add your friends who are already on the site and invite the others who are not there yet to join. Once you have your profile just go online on the chat and see which one of your friends are also online. Keep in mind that when you go online on Facebook Chat you are shown online to everybody on your list by default. Whenever you log into your Facebook account you are automatically logged into Facebook chatting also unless you change the settings.
In order to chat in a Facebook you don’t have to sign in anywhere else neither you have to go to a particular page, it is there at the bottom of your screen at the right side. You will see a green light showing that you are online and the number of your friends who are currently online which are mentioned inside the curly brackets.
For chatting you just have to click on that box and then a list will pop up showing a list of your online friends. Friends who are online and currently active are shown with a green light and others who are logged in and not doing anything are shown idle. You will come to know that a friend is idle or not by a half moon like icon instead of the green light beside their names. Facebook makes a popping noise when there is a new message and thus you can do your other work without concentrating on the chat window waiting for a response.
You can either have a private chat with one of your friends or you can have a group chat where you can have discussion on any topic or discuss things in general.
Private chats are only for two people and no one else can know anything about that chat it only between two people.
Facebook also provides the facility of chatting in groups. You can chat with more than one person in a single window and everyone in the group can read and type messages and be part of that discussion. When a new member logs in and enters the chat room, it is visible to everyone in the group and they can all welcome their new guest. There is also a facility for offline members as they can also view the entire chat when they log in.
There have been lots of incidents where one needs to recall certain things which were discussed in chat rooms but was not able to do it due to the lack of chat history feature which records the entire discussion. Facebook has also now recently provided that features too, where all the chat sessions are saved and can be accessed anytime. This is one of the latest features developed by Facebook for its users.
You can also access Facebook chat through your mobile phone. You just have to install certain applications which are available smartphones including Blackberry phones. Facebook chat works as well on these devices as it does on a computer. Did you know that you can also use Facebook Pics As Caller ID?
It is convenient to have it all in one place as you can read the wall and check out photos and at the same time chat with your friend without moving to any other chatting software.
Facebook chat has become very popular within a very short span of time and even though it entered a market which at the time was predominantly dominated by the giants like MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and Skype etc. Facebook’s user friendliness and wide user base helped make its chat popular in a short amount of time even though the features of the chat itself are rather simplistic and limited.
Facebook has a large international user base in spite of being blocked intermittently or permanently in a number of countries. There is hardly anyone in the world that has been on the Internet and has not heard of Facebook. The Chatting facility was added to Facebook about four years after the site was launched. Since then Facebookers didn’t need to log into some other application to chat with their friends as long as they are also logged into Facebook chat and online at the same time. When other users are not online on Facebook you can always send them a regular message. Having all your family and friends at one place is very convenient.
Overall, Facebook chat is simple to use and operate and anyone can use this application without any hassles. Most of the features are user friendly and self explanatory.
More things to do on Facebook
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- Create free photo and movie slide shows for your Facebook profile! Try Smilebox free for 14-days!
Reference book: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Facebook
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