A while back, The Facebook added instant-messaging (IM) through their web interface. It's a neat little trinket that can connect you to your friends when you are both on the Facebook site. What's more interesting is that the various multi-protocol IM clients have started to support Facebook chat. The latest Adium beta (for Mac OS X), and Pidgin (for Linux) and Trillian (Windows) and probably every other client now support Facebook chat.
Which leads to an interesting question: where do you spend more time managing your list of friends and groups of friends? AIM? Yahoo IM? Probably not -- for many people, the Facebook is their definitive list of friends and acquaintances, and having that list in your IM client is a perfectly natural fit. I use Pidgin on Linux as my primary IM client, and if I "show my offline buddies" (and sort by status to make the list manageable), then I can even hover over any contact to see their most recent Facebook status message. That message is almost always more interesting than a simple IM status too (compare "David is juggling baby geese" vs. "David is away"...).
I know that people folks are slow to change, and IM platforms are especially sticky. But in looking through my IM list, I have only two or three folks left that I communicate with via AIM (the rest are via Yahoo or Facebook). I can easily see AIM going away for me in a year. Will Yahoo Messenger follow AIM down the path of irrelevance? The writing may be on the wall for non-social network instant messaging.
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