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Stop talking to me!

Posted in Grumbles, Social Networks, Facebook on April 10, 2008 at 11:48 am

So, Facebook has added a chat function to its social networking site. It’s currently being rolled out across the site’s thousands of users, but will eventually be available to everyone, displaying in a bar at the bottom of the page and allowing users to talk to their friends in real time, rather than via messages or wall posts.

MySpace has had a similar service for donkey’s, and Gmail’s chat function will let your AOL or Gmail contacts talk to you in real time, too. (And anyone you e-mail at a Gmail address automatically gets added to your contact list, aggravatingly, so if you don’t want someone to know you’re online and be able to contact you, you’ll have to take ‘em back off.)

While I’m not being forced to use Facebook Chat, obviously, and I can choose to be signed out/invisible on all of these services, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s possible that I’m mildly OCD - I really hate having multiple programs hanging around that essentially serve the same purpose, and I already use MSN Messenger. I guess I just don’t see the point, and am frustrated with having to always turn things off, instead of on. Facebook is enough of a pestering-machine as it is, what with the constant stream of application invitations and the “poke” function; adding a chat function is overkill.

What’s the point of using a social networking site to IM, anyway? The two are different and, in my opinion anyway, should be kept separate.