You and Facebook Chat problems

Due to its demand crossing demographics and countries, Facebook has instituted a chat tool. But as the years dragged on since its inception in 2008, it has admittedly experienced some Facebook Chat problems. Facebook Chat was actually released in April 2008. It is a sidebar located at the lower portion of your Facebook page. And it is retained there until one opts to log out of Facebook. But you can also have the option in Facebook layouts of minimizing the Facebook Chat bar. Yet Facebook Chat is not just limited to the Web. You can also log in to it using iPhone, AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live. And as with private messaging, Facebook Chat is a private conversation between two or multiple users in a conference. Messages are saved up to a number of days. Today, though, all your chat conversations are included saved in the Messages inbox and this has admittedly caused problems.

The main problem with Facebook is that they are facing other competing social networking web sites so much that they tend to change their features every week or so. And that’s just changing the features. But this does not necessarily mean that every time Facebook features change they improve. Just read about any Facebook Chat problem that crops up. Some are a hassle. And Facebook Chat is not exempted.

Users will always complain about a Facebook Chat problem. For starters, Facebook Chat now includes in the list even your friends that are offline. According to Facebook, this is so you can easily send private messages to a friend who is offline on the Facebook Chat sidebar. But if you are really intent on sending a private message to a friend even when he or she is offline, then you simply go to his/her wall. It’s as easy as that. No need to include those offline friends on Facebook Chat, right? But with this new Facebook feature, you have to scroll down a very long list of friends who are both online and offline. That’s just plain nuts.

And then there’s this feature where only selected friends can be found online and the rest of your thousands of friends can be found at the bottom. That’s a lot of unfairness…and scrolling. The ones online are marked with green bullets while those offline are marked with gray bullets. Now, that’s a Facebook Chat problem. They even have an automated system which predicts whom to send offline messages. What must be the gauge of their system? With Facebook having millions of users in several alphabets and languages already, this constant changing of features is irritating. It is irritating not just to you and your friends and your neighbor next door but irritating to millions of users worldwide, thanks to Facebook being the most widely distributed social network brand all over the world.

Users can’t find any other alternative. On Twitter, you can merely tweet a brief sentence. Google Plus is still in its infancy but is a potential alternative though. Tumblr is okay but its marketing department sort of has a problem since it has not reached across all demographics. Friendster is too obsolete. With Facebook having a real monopoly on the social networking system on the Net, all the million users in the world are beholden to Facebook. And we can’t do anything about it since we are no administrators. That’s real dumb of us. Maybe we should create another social networking site. And end up like Tumblr – losers. Oh no, everything is bleak for us indeed.

But here’s good news though. Facebook Chat can still be reversed to the old setup with only online users that can be seen. However, this reversal can only be performed on the Firefox Web browser since Firefox is open source software not beholden to any company. And then Facebook Chat has now introduced video chat. This lure may possibly multiply the already many new users who have signed up on Facebook recently. This will radically change everything. Video chat on Facebook will definitely be cool. All you have to do is click on the webcam on your computer and log in via Skype.

With all the hullaballoo surrounding the seemingly erratic ways Facebook has been doing in the past few months, Facebook actually issued a statement sometime last August about the matter. According to Facebook, the recent changes are reflective of how the creative team decides on a few experimental rollouts. These rollouts will be enhanced as time goes on a few more months from now. So, expect more of these changes from Facebook any day from now, especially the Facebook Chat feature and keep tabs on Facebook Chat problems. All of us are certainly hoping that these issues will never be experienced by us again. But must we be keeping that as a sustaining hope or should we inhibit from Facebook altogether?