The Facebook Blog

No one likes being cut off in the middle of a conversation. That's as true on Facebook Chat as it is in person.

Many of you have told us that sometimes your Chat session comes and goes or even stops completely. We're working hard to end those interruptions so that your experience is stable and consistent.

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.

By integrating Facebook Chat with your preferred instant messenger, you'll never miss a message when you have to navigate away from Facebook and you'll be in control of how and where you chat with your Facebook friends. Simply connect your Facebook account with... the instant messaging client of your choice and start chatting. You will not need to stay logged in to Facebook.com to continue to access your Facebook friends.

If you don't want all of your online friends to appear, you can adjust which Friend Lists show up in chat by adjusting them on Facebook. To go offline, you can either close your instant messaging client or click "go offline" in your Facebook Chat options. As always, your conversations will remain completely private and only between you and your Facebook friends.

Notifications let you know when people take actions on Facebook related to you, so you can quickly check out a photo you've been tagged in or read a new posting on your Wall. They already are available from your home page or from the notifications icon within the Facebook Chat bar at the bottom of your browser, but we want to make sure you know immediately when your friends are sharing something new with you.

Beginning today, when you are online with Facebook Chat, entire notifications will appear automatically and in real time above the Chat... bar as pop-up alerts. For instance, if a friend has written on your wall, you'll see a new notification appear like this:



After a few seconds, the notification will automatically disappear, but you'll still be able to see a list of all of your notifications when you click on the notifications icon. You'll also continue to see a count of all the notifications you've not yet viewed, indicated in red.



A common use of notifications with applications on Facebook is for multi-player gaming. For example, when you're playing a game and take your turn, your opponent receives a notification so they know to take their turn. The immediate notifications can help you play a game faster.

You can turn off specific types of notifications if you don't want to receive them. When a notification appears, click the "X" to close it. You then will be asked if you want to permanently turn off future notifications of that same type. For example, if you choose to permanently delete a notification about posted links, you won't receive any future notifications about posted links from your friends.


Arjun, an engineer at Facebook, can't wait to see what pops up after this post.

Since we launched Facebook Chat, many of you have asked for ways to organize your connections and to control which friends see you online. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. You can now do that by using Friend Lists to filter your connections in Chat.

Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings.

From the bottom right corner of... your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.

Creating Lists
To create a new list, simply select the "Friend Lists" menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the "Friend Lists" menu. If you don't want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you'll then see your friends listed alphabetically.



If some of your friends aren't in a Friend List yet, they'll be included under "Other Friends."

Going Offline
Alongside each list, you'll notice a green switch; when you turn off the switch, you'll be logging off of Chat for that list. Friends in lists that are switched off will not be able to see that you are online or chat with you, nor will you be able to see whether they are online.



Friend Lists are useful in organizing and filtering your experience on Facebook, especially as you have more friends from different parts of your life. To learn about other ways to use them on the site, watch this recent video tutorial.


Rob, a designer at Facebook, will see you online...or maybe not.

This week marks the launch of Facebook Chat—a new way for you to communicate with your friends in real-time. The Wall and Inbox have been the primary ways to communicate, but when more immediacy is necessary—for example when making plans for lunch in half an hour or arguing over a foul call in the NCAA tournament—they might not be enough. Chat aims to fill this gap.

We'll be rolling this 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." Unlike the Wall or Inbox, the messages are delivered and displayed to your friend as soon as they're sent, so you should expect a response right away and without any page loading. Of course, Chat has to play nice with the rest of the Facebook experience. You can collapse conversations to get them out of the way, and go offline if you don't want to use Chat at all. Chat is there when you want it, and tucked away when you don't.

We're working on pulling other features of the site into the real- time Chat world. Your notifications will now arrive in the Chat bar, and while chatting you'll see your friend's Mini-Feed activity thrown into the conversation, as it occurs.

Before we jump head-first into this new real-time approach to Facebook, it's worth spending some time thinking about privacy. Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there's a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don't want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we'll continue to make sure that you are in control.

Chat is by no means a new concept, as instant messaging systems have been around for over a decade. But just as other features on Facebook have allowed friends to communicate more efficiently than before, we hope Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly.



Josh, a Facebook engineering lead, is checking who's online.