> everyone was there

This is exactly why I turned chat off. I have no desire to be contacted by old high school classmates who happen to be bored and browsing facebook, and see me pop up.

Yes but people who are bored and browsing Facebook and don't follow technology minute by minute, outnumber people like us by a huge margin. Facebook launching these three (not so new) features just means that its making video calling more accessible to other people, which means its probably going to work for them.

(Personally, I still feel surprised whenever I see anyone even using Facebook chat.)

I use Facebook chat to talk to close friends because sometimes it's more convenient than picking up a phone to talk to someone out of the country. Allows for more random conversations. Having the Skype feature is an added bonus, no one's requiring you to use it. Just because FB chat is more buggy, that doesn't mean the convenience doesn't highly outweigh the disadvantages. Logging into a different chat client would be for chat-only, while FB isn't.

It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.

You can set up a friends list, and turn on chat only for that friends list, if you like. Set up the friends list at https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and then click the little settings icon at the bottom right (in the new chat design) and choose "Limit availability...".

With the old chat design, choose chat at the bottom right, then the "Friend lists" menu item in the chat window, and add the friends list you want to affect chat availability, and then turn availability on/off to particular lists.

Useful for parents and work colleagues who don't use other IM or who you don't want to give your personal IM accounts to.

I think this discussion made me realize that I want there to be a minimum barrier to contacting me in a way that requires instant feedback. I don't care who has my e-mail address because I can reply to e-mail on my own time and terms, but I'd rather people have to do a little work to contact me via IM, and I want it to be pretty hard for people to casually call me just to chat.

Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.

Sure, but that's extra work, and the people I'd allow to see my presence generally can reach me in other ways.

Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.

I assume you mean FB lists, as the groups feature is quite different. /pedantic

Oops. Me bad. FB lists it is.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a 10 year gap in your IM technology timeline there. AIM straight to Facebook? Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along?

You may have been one of the few using ICQ and MSN after AIM. ICQ was much earlier in the chronology (we used to play with it when we got bored on IRC) and no one used MSN. :-P

MSN was (is?) pretty popular in Latin America. I had 0 "real life" friends on AIM. My few AIM buddies were people I met in games.

Indeed. I don't know about today, but back in 2006 MSN was as popular as AIM and Yahoo! worldwide and particularly strong in certain areas -- there are some countries where it was even a verb ("I'll MSN you"). But then MS changed the name to "Windows Live Messenger", underinvested, and prioritized search instead. Ah well.

is. I was just all over Central and South America, and internet cafes were always full of high school kids, every single screen full of MSN chat windows.

Indeed, here in Argentina MSN is the default chat application.

My understanding is that MSN was/is the most popular IM service most everywhere but the US (because of AIM?) and East Asia (where they have their own regionally popular services, like QQ in China).

I used all of those - and ICQ was still largely my favorite, if only because it supported offline messages.

I think its largest drawback was using account numbers, instead of allowing alphanumeric vanity names.

Let's not forget the tack-a-tack sound...

I think this is somewhat regional. I'm from Canada, and no one I know uses AIM. MSN seems to be the most common chat program, although Skype is increasing in popularity.

Yea same with me. In Canada we used MSN and when I moved back to the US it was AIM, even though MSN felt like a much better product.

>Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along

I don't know, was you the only person on that service and thus have no-one to talk to?

IM is always running in the background. Facebook requires going to the website and logging in and monitoring it. And being "available" to a huge swath of people. Not to mention, all of my colleagues and co-workers are on IM. I'm not going to reach out to a colleague to ask about a client via facebook chat and I'm not going to communicate with a client via facebook, instead of IM.

In short, Facebook likely contains everyone you've ever met or dealt with in person or online and "friended" that can potentially chat with you -- IM likely contains only the people you actually need to chat with.

"Everyone is there" is becoming an increasingly poor reason to justify selling your soul to a particular social network (as an individual or a business).

When I was in school everyone used MSN and then later when I switched AIM. Still use them, because those people are still there. Have really mostly ignored facebook chat, and fbchat also does not show user status messages.

They've basically just brought facebook chat on par with instant messengers from the 2000s except you have to install something additional for video chat.

I think cheap text messaging helped to kill AIM more than Facebook.