Wow. Looks to me like Facebook just launched a chat application. Interesting. I know from experience that web-based chat is a bit of a pain, especially when you’re not using Flash. We did an early implementation with Userplane at Spark that worked decently, but not “perfectly”. If Facebook’s implementation works it could keep people online longer, but with many members adding their IM contact info to their profiles, I’m not sure I would have chosen to take the time to develop such a complex feature that has so much competition (AIM, MSN, Y!, GTalk, Skype, etc).
The two biggest technical problems with web-based chat are:
1. Knowing whether or not someone is really online – I don’t think there’s a reliable way to determine if someone has just left their browser open and gone to the mall or if they’re reading a long profile. Not to mention issues w/ caching, expiring sessions, constantly pinging to see if the window is still open, etc.
2. Getting users to notice when someone is actually trying to chat with them without being obnoxious about it. This is a pain in the butt. I have yet to see someone do it well in a web browser. Oh yeah and most browsers have multiple tabs nowadays – tough to get people to notice when they aren’t looking.
We tried an interesting implementation using a Flash pixel instead of a refreshing iframe or javascript to maintain an open connection between the user and the server. This allowed for greater accuracy and instant reaction time with notifications of chat requests. Sorry to say it was never actually deployed because the developer who worked on it was fired 3 days after it was ready to go.
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