Used Facebook Chat for the first time last night. A friend I haven’t spoken to in eight years pinged me. It was amazing getting back in touch with her, and I’d like to thank Facebook for that. Here’s how the experience went. She initiated a chat. I didn’t notice for about 30 minutes because I was browsing in another tab. I clicked over, saw the chat, and thought, “oh cool!” I replied and we began chatting. Within five minutes we were getting a little confused. The lag was just enough so that we were constantly interrupting each other in mid statement. We then exchanged instant messenger screennames and continued the conversation over a real instant messenger. My take on the experience – great way to initiate a contact with a long lost friend, but not adequate for extended dialogs (by extended I mean anything over five or six back and forths).
Not an unexpected experience given the challenges associated with web-based IM mentioned in my previous post. The back and forth nature of the web doesn’t lend itself to “instant” things. Even if the post/response mechanism is quick, rendering isn’t. It’s not like a web browser rendering HTML/CSS with some javascript can really compete against a real application when it comes to responsiveness, and w/ web-based chat that’s exactly what you are doing. Remember many people’s first experiences on the Internet were tied directly to AOL instant messaging and chatrooms, not web pages. Their expectations are high when it comes to IM for a reason.
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