Facebook Chat Now Available Everywhere
We believe you should be able to connect with your Facebook friends everywhere. We're happy to announce that now you can with Facebook Chat. Starting today, the more than two billion chat messages sent on the site every day can be sent from your favorite desktop instant messaging client.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's messaging push has been building for years — the site had already reworked its inbox in August 2007 (Facebook Messaging just got better), and by early February 2010 it was shipping messaging-adjacent features in rapid succession, including a new photo uploader on February 5 and a physical Gifts service priced in Credits days earlier.
Opening its more than two billion daily chat messages to desktop instant-messaging clients turns Facebook Chat from a site feature into a network endpoint — notable timing given reports circulating the same week that Facebook was developing a web-based email service (rumored, unconfirmed) and commentary that its nearly 400 million users were putting it in direct competition with Google and Yahoo.
First-order effects
- Users can send and receive Facebook chats from their existing desktop IM client without keeping facebook.com open, moving daily message volume off Facebook's own pages and onto third-party software.
- Facebook effectively joins the roster of federated IM networks alongside services like Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger, making its buddy list reachable wherever those clients already run.
Second-order effects
- Standalone IM networks face a new competitive dynamic: Facebook offers chat backed by a real-name friend graph of roughly 400 million users rather than an opt-in contact list, pressuring rivals to answer with their own openness or integrations.
- A confirmed open chat channel lays groundwork consistent with the rumored web-based email effort reported February 5 — if unconfirmed, the combination would let Facebook attack webmail incumbents from both the inbox and the buddy list.
Third-order effects
- If chat ubiquity holds, instant messaging migrates from standalone networks toward social graphs as the identity layer, with desktop clients becoming interchangeable windows onto whichever network owns your friends.
- Messaging data flowing through third-party clients also raises the privacy stakes for Facebook, which was already defending a $9.5 million Beacon settlement offer that same week — a pattern pointing toward closer regulatory scrutiny of how broadly user communications are distributed.
The trend: Instant messaging is being absorbed into social networks, with Facebook extending its chat beyond its own site so the social graph, not the IM network, becomes where conversations live.