facebook announced today that this week, April 6th, is the week facebook chat will roll-out. This new ‘killer’ app was on the sights of many developers, analysts and bloggers, and I guess facebook developers got the same memo.
“We’ll be rolling this (facebook chat) out slowly going forward, but fairly soon you’ll notice our new Chat bar at the bottom of your browser—no installation or assembly required. From this bar you can view your list of online friends and open conversations with any or all of them. There’s no need to setup a buddy list.”
Couple of questions for the community/developers:
- will you be able to multi-chat with several friends?
- what advanced functionality will the chat have (screenshare, screengrab, file sharing)?
- will the facebook chat API be available for developers (plugin for telephony for instance?)?
Now, a challenge to my Lotus colleagues in Israel and the US – add facebook chat as another community to my Lotus Sametime client or embed Lotus Notes 8.0.1 client… that would revolutionize the industry (and create some new security issues, for sure.. 😉
With additional 69 millions public IM users, I bet the guys over at Gartner are very happy now, seeing their predictions become a reality.
