Webware

Friend Lists has long been an underused feature in Facebook. The feature allows users to split their friends up into different groups, choosing different privacy settings for each one. It is clear now that Facebook has bigger plans for the feature and it's getting serious about trying to persuade people to use it. Recently, Facebook automatically created Friend Lists for its users in an effort to help them filter and better consume their Live Stream. Now, Facebook has redesigned their Chat feature in order to take advantage of Friend Lists. Users can now organize their previously unwieldy Chat lists into groups, defined by their Friend Lists.

Upon loading up Chat for the first time since this change, Facebook users are prompted to say which Friend Lists they want to add to Chat. Users can segment these friends into sublists for Chat, and everyone else gets dumped into a generic "Other Friends" list. This alone is going to be enough for a lot of users to put these previously uncategorized friends into a List. While there apparently wasn't enough motivation for users to group their friends before, now that they are grouping them for the purposes of a clean Chat list, the rest of the functionality of Friend Lists throughout the site is unlocked. Suddenly users can now filter by these Lists that they have taken the time to create, send Inbox messages to whole lists, and create customized privacy settings. I have no doubt that Facebook has more plans for Friend Lists as well.

Not only does this new grouping by Friend Lists give users a cleaner view of their online friends, but users can also toggle whether they appear offline or online for a certain group. This is yet another feature that is going to provoke people to start organizing their friends.

Facebook has been doing a lot of work lately, building new functionality into the site. On Friday, the site brought "refresh alerts" to its home page and now it just rolled out this newly enhanced Chat. It looks like the Facebookers are working overtime to try to win back the hearts of some of the users that they angered in their last major redesign.

Editors' note: At 2:30 p.m., April 14, we added information about the Instant Lookup feature and other in-chat features. Updated information can be found at the bottom of the post.

The first of the multiprotocol chat clients, Trillian got its start nine years ago and had been updated with some regularity through 2005 and 2006. It was included in the Google Pack, a collection of freeware that Google was supporting. On the heels of Trillian 3.1, Cerulean Studios announced that Trillian 4, code-named Astra, was in development, and would finally port the service to Mac and Linux.

Except for the occasional minor announcement, that was the last big news about Trillian. Competition from more frequently updated services like Pidgin, Digsby, and Adium has drawn away fans, but now there's a private beta of Astra that seems to be accepting invitation requests from everybody who wants one. You can sign up for the Astra beta here--let us know if you don't get an invite, because it seems that Cerulean is taking all comers.

Back when it was announced, Astra sounded great. Support for even more chat protocols, better encryption protection, and a downloadable contact list were just a few of the tantalizing features. Facebook integration was added to the list, eventually, but by that time, many users had moved on. Astra, as it stands now, is good at what it does--but the competition has caught up.

It does everything that it should do at this point. It services multiple chat protocol, including mainstream services like Yahoo, AOL, Google, and ICQ. MySpaceIM is supported, and Skype is included, but it requires the program to be running before it can be accessed through Astra--just as Skype does with other multichat applications. It includes POP3 and IMAP account notifications rolled in alongside the Facebook and Web mail notices.

There are other useful tweaks and changes. By default, a pop-up window will appear when you receive a chat. Click on it once and you'll see two options, one for a standard Reply and the other for a Quick Reply. The Quick Reply will open a text field in the pop-up that you can write your response in, while hitting Reply will bring up the main chat window. Video chat and Webcam support are supported by default, and three view modes are available for changing up your chat window appearance.

Astra is extensible, and impressively only crashed once, when I was jumping from a Gmail notification to the actual mail message. When you install though, don't just cruise through the process on auto-pilot or you'll wind up with the Weather Channel toolbar and the Ask.com toolbar. Two other problems stuck out: the news ticker that appears at the top of the chat window can't be removed or even configured to run headlines that are useful to you, and the search function in the Options menu doesn't work. This makes it difficult to navigate through the overhaul, since many features have changed in the update.

It feels faster and smoother than previous versions of Trillian, but that's the least it should be, considering when its last update happened. The Astra skin feels slick and modern, but it can be a bit irritating at first as important features blend into the background because of a lack of contrasting colors. Overall, the experience feels smoother than I remember Trillian being, although I probably haven't touched it in about two years.

Trillian Astra is a good chat client, and it doesn't suffer from a "too little, too late" syndrome. This is a solid, modern multichat client. The question that won't be answered until it finally comes out, though, is whether anyone still cares.

Update: What I referred to above as the news ticker, Trillian calls the "Instant Lookup." It's accessible in Preferences under the Chat option. Users can configure which feeds or Instant Lookups appear, although that's not readily apparent. Click on an item to modify it and an X will appear on the right side. Click the X to remove the item, and remove all of them to remove the news ticker completely. You can add RSS feeds or "lookup" services using the buttons at the bottom of the window, but overall it's not an intuitive process. The X's could appear by default, for example, or there could be mouse-over instructions.

There's also a default feature that I neglected to point out that underlines in certain words green. Mouse over the word or phrase and the Wikipedia definitions will appear. Click on one of those words and a menu appears from which you can Copy the definition to the clipboard, Search for the term on the Web, or View the Wikipedia entry by loading the Wikipedia page. While the first and third options worked flawlessly, the Search feature took me to the Cerulean Studios Web page and tried to download an app without an extension.

I stand by my initial analysis of Astra's new features that while they're useful, they're hard to configure and some are still buggy or nonfunctional.

My favorite IM application, Trillian, has just put out a brand new build of its upcoming Astra product for alpha testers. New are Facebook notifications and quick shortcuts to jump straight to things like photo galleries and user profiles. Sorely missing from that, however, is Facebook's chat, which is what I think many Trillian users have been pining for (myself included). Free competitor Digsby has had Facebook chat integration since the beginning of May, shortly after the service was launched.

Scott Werndorfer, co-founder and head developer of Trillian, tells me his team is waiting on proper XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) integration with Facebook chat to be finished, something that might be announced at next week's F8 event after originally being promised in mid-May. Until then developers have had to cobble together their own solutions that require the use of your browser--something nobody wants to deal with with their desktop chat application.

The good news is that the new build brings with it support for IRC--the chat medium that has proven to be invaluable for things like live blogging and customer care chat in enterprise businesses. Trillian has full support for administrative controls and server surfing. You can also encrypt the contents of your chat room in case you're sharing personal or business information--something AIM and many others don't provide.

Trillian Astra is currently in private alpha, meaning you'll have to sign up to be a tester to give it a spin. You can find the sign-up page here.

Facebook Chat might've had a simple and quiet launch, but a month later, the social network is already announcing plans to upgrade.

Engineer David Reiss announced Tuesday evening on the Facebook Developer Blog that Facebook Chat will soon have an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) interface--that's better known as Jabber. This will mean that external clients will be able to incorporate Facebook Chat, currently restricted in most cases to the browser.

Universal IM clients Digsby (which is PC-only) and Adium (which is Mac-only) have already worked in ways to support Facebook Chat.

Through Facebook's official Jabber support, which is coming "in the near future," Facebook members will be able to not only chat with their friends, but also see friends' profile pictures through the IM client and set their Facebook statuses.

Do-it-all communication app Digsby (download) put out an important update yesterday that's made this blogger's life easier. It took Facebook's Web-only chat service and integrated it into a desktop application, something that Gabtastik (which I looked at yesterday) did to a limited degree by loading it in a standalone Webkit-powered mini browser.

While residing outside of people's primary browsers, Gabtastik's efforts were still running the pop-out version of normal FB chat. Digsby's solution is far more powerful. Despite the fact there are no API plugs for chat (for now), you can maintain conversations with several folks just like you would in any normal IM app. And because Digsby plugs into other IM networks, you can have chats with your buddies from AIM, Yahoo, and more, all within the same app.

The biggest winners in this situation are power users, who are getting a huge leg up over FB chat users who are accessing the app from their browsers if only for the notification options. You can get pop-ups on when your friends come online, even if your browser is minimized, as well as view a past transcript of chatter.

In addition to adding FB chat, Digsby also fixed several problems with Yahoo Mail, which wasn't working because of the two different variations of the mail app that Yahoo's got floating around. Since we last wrote about it, the service also added an autoupdater so you'll never have to download a new version with installer every time there's a new version.

While Digbsy continues to push forward, Cerulean Studios' Trillian is still not yet at an open beta for its upcoming Astra product (coverage). I've been using (and enjoying) it on a daily basis, but services like Digsby have been tempting me if only for the social-tracking features that remove the need for multiple aggregation apps.

So you've been having fun with Facebook's somewhat half-baked chat service for the last day now, but are you growing tired of having to first log-in, then pop-out the chat window? For those of you who want to chat without this two-step process, there's a nice little tweak discovered by Mozilla Links that lets you set Facebook chat to pop out in Firefox's side bar.

I'm not really a fan of sidebar driven applications (gDocsBar not included), but this implementation works out pretty well. It will load up your buddy list and work just like the pop-out version does--minus of course the actual pop-up.

I'm still waiting for Facebook to add away and invisible modes, and allow other chat applications, such as Pidgin, Meebo, and Trillian, to integrate it. In the meantime, this tweak makes it a little more bearable.

[via DownloadSquad]

Facebook announced Wednesday morning that its in-browser Facebook Chat feature is now live to all members, over two weeks after it first debuted to a limited number of users.

It was clear that Facebook was concerned with the stability of the chat application, first debuting it on a Sunday when many members--not to mention tech bloggers eager to report any flaw or bug--might not be at their computers.

The social network then rolled out Facebook Chat incrementally, with different "networks" on the site--geographic regions, colleges, companies--gaining access to it before others so that the new feature could stay under control. Some had the feature as early as April 6; a number of large networks couldn't access it until very recently.

Facebook now has nearly 70 million users.

So far, Facebook Chat is indeed rolling out slowly. Of my 130-odd friends, only 5 show up Chat-ready, but more seem to be appearing as the hours tick by. At first, the limited list makes for an uncompelling experience, but as all Facebook users gain access, the experience will change. Imagine: stumbling across a old high school friend on Facebook and immediately engaging in conversation. (Or, worse, immediately finding all about your college ex's wonderful new life.)

The Facebook Chat Web app itself is easy and straightforward. Look to the bottom-right corner of an open Facebook browser window to see how many of your friends are online and available to chat. Click their names and start typing. The most right-hand icon brings up your status window, where you can change your status to "offline" in order to avoid invites.

Facebook Chat's help page confirms the slow rollout: "We are currently running a pre-launch beta to a few networks to make sure that the product is ready to go. Once Facebook Chat is ready, we'll release the feature to everyone on Facebook." Even once Facebook Chat leaves beta, not everyone will have immediate access and some may never--currently, the Web app works only with Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 2, and Safari 2 for PC and Firefox 2, Safari 2, and Safari 3 for Mac.

If you're in one of the early rollout Facebook networks (so far, Harvard seems to be one of them. Any others?) and want to chat with many friends simultaneously, you can take advantage of the "pop-out" Chat window, which opens a small, floating browser window to better manage a lot of chatter. Unfortunately, however, the Web app only alerts you to new messages or conversations within its active browser window. There's no sound to alert you to new messages, so you won't see them until you pull up Facebook or your pop-out window. Nor can you block specific friends from starting chats, but Facebook says it's working on that.

Additional small complaints include: no compatibility with other, third-party chat clients; no platform integration for outside developers; and no party-line chat. Still, I predict the success of Facebook Chat is all in the (healthy) network.

Facebook chose a Sunday afternoon, when much of the tech blogger corps was pleasantly enjoying real life (we can hope), to start rolling out its previously announced instant-messaging client. That's likely no coincidence: this is a major new feature for the social-networking site, and debuting it on a weekend afternoon probably ensured a smoother integration.

A Facebook employee told me in the days before the launch that it was "a big challenge" to get ready to roll out Facebook Chat to the site's 67 million members. Because of that, Facebook has opted for a gradual rollout rather than a large-scale launch to all members at one time. The in-browser client, which lets members of the site talk to their Facebook friends who are logged in, is still not live on many Facebook accounts--mine, for example.

Facebook has earned criticism from some performance monitoring firms for unreliability, and the Techmeme set is notorious for not cutting companies a whole lot of slack--remember when Google relaunched Blogger late in 2006? After "Beacongate," Facebook doesn't need another PR debacle.

And as an extra precaution, the debut version of the application is extremely light. There is no support for external IM clients yet, though the company has said it's exploring Jabber support. For now, that means it probably won't be pulling chat-friendly Web users away from their existing services (the AIMs, Yahoos, and Google Talks of the world) and clients like Meebo and Adium. Yet.

In that respect, the launch of Facebook Chat is much like the history of Facebook itself. The service famously started in a Harvard dorm and was limited to students with Harvard e-mail addresses before gradually rolling out to other universities, then companies, and finally the general public.

Considering the site remains the toast of the town all over Silicon Valley nearly a year after the launch of its developer platform thrust it into the spotlight, it looks like they've been pretty successful in spite of that caution.

The new addition to Facebook likely won't have the impact of drawing new members or "converting" people from other social networks. Where it will make a difference, however, is on the amount of time that members spend on the site, which can make a big difference for advertisers.

On the flip side, this could spell doom for those hours you whittle away on Facebook at the office all day. If your boss hasn't blocked access to the site yet, browser-based instant messaging could be the final straw.