Pretty Facebook Chat is a Google Chrome extension that lets you customize your Facebook Chat experience further. You will notice the red dot that the extension adds next to Facebook’s Chat menu on the lower right corner of the page. This is used to turn the extension on or off. Once you start a chat with someone on Facebook, you will notice the modified user interface right away.

The first thing that becomes obvious right away is that the chat window is no longer attached to the page. You can drag and drop the chat around on the page to move it to a position that you find more comfortable. You can however only move it around in the Chrome window, and not to a location outside of it.

You may also notice that the chat window is larger than the standard window on Facebook, and that its author has added interface customizations to it, like shadows or little animations.

Another thing that you will notice is the emoticons button that has been added to the window. You can click on it to display a large list of emoticons and images that you can add to the chat with a click. This even includes a list of miniature profile pictures that can be added to individual messages.

Here is a video that demonstrates the capabilities of the extension.

Facebook users who use the Chrome browser to connect to the site may want to take a look at the extension to spice up their chat experience on the site. The extension is available for direct installation at the official Chrome Web Store.

A direct link to Facebook’s Messenger has now been posted on the Windows Club website. Windows users who install the client on their system need to connect the program with a Facebook account before they can use its functionality.

A click on log in opens the Facebook website in the default browser. Here it is then necessary to log in, the client will automatically recognize the log in. Facebook notes that users need to enable the “keep me logged in” feature if they want to use the messenger after closing the browser.

Facebook Messenger looks like a bare bones version of Firefox. Users see three icons at top which indicate friend requests, messages and notifications. Facebook Ticker information and contacts are displayed below.

Chats open in a new window that is using a tabbed interface to separate different chats. The program is bare bones otherwise at the moment. The only other options provided are displayed in the system tray icon’s right-click context menu. Here it is possible to dock the Facebook Messenger window to the right of the screen, and to turn off sound notifications.

Facebook Messenger did not work on a 64-bit version of Windows 7. The client worked fine on the other hand on a 32-bit version of Windows. It is not clear if the software is only compatible with 32-bit versions of Windows, or if a setting on the 64-bit test system caused the incompatibility. The player opened fine, but log in was not recognized on the 64-bit system.

Facebook users who use Windows as their operating system can download the messenger from this link.

Facebook is actually announcing three new features today, of which all three are directly related to Facebook chat.

Probably the most requested feature of the three is the new group chat option, allowing Facebook users to chat not only with one friend but additional friends. This is easily done by clicking on the new “Add friends to chat” button in the chat window.

The second new feature is video calling in cooperation with Skype. It is now possible to call friends with a click on the Call button that is available on profiles and in chat windows. It is not clear yet if group video chat will be available, but it seems as if it is limited to one on one chat for now.

Video Calling will be rolled out to all Facebook users over the coming weeks. Users who do not want to wait can get it right here on this Facebook page. Facebook recommends Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. The company seems to check the browser and version on the page. My Firefox Aurora build for instance was rejected on the page.

We’re sorry.
Video calling isn’t available on this browser. Please try again with a different browser.

The third and final announcement is for a new chat design that includes a sidebar listing people a user messages most.

Skype has released a new version of their program that integrates Facebook into the voice and video chat software. Facebook users can now integrate their Facebook stream into Skype, update their status from Skype and comment and like directly from the software as well.

To summarize. Facebook adds group chat and video calling to their site. Both features have been requested by many users and will make great additions. When you compare them to Google+, you will notice that Google this time is one step ahead. The hangout feature of Google+ supports live video chat with a maximum of ten contacts, whereas Facebook’s video chat seems to be limited to one on one video chat currently.

Has the announcement fulfilled your expectations? Let me know in the comments (via).

I personally think that it is a big announcement and step into the right direction. It might even be bigger for Skype, who were recently acquired by Microsoft, considering that the company gets access to Facebook’s 750 million user base.

Well, that is not quite what has happened in the real world. The webcam, sparing a select few business applications like long distance interviewing, has been degraded to a pretty much strictly social tool, becoming the tool of choice for teenage girls to talk to one another when ten feet away and long distance lovers to visit from miles apart. While some remote areas do indeed utilize webcams for doctor visits, most of its other applications have been limited to the less savory sections of the web. In short, the web cam never met its full potential.

There is, however, a quiet company that is attempting to capitalize on this social focus of webcams and utilize it for the better. They call their product line “Rounds,” and it can be applied in several different settings to add a webcam element to different parts of the web. To use the products you do, of course, have to have a webcam set up, and for optimal usage you need a microphone as well.

The main tool in their line is a simple Facebook application that allows you to do various things while sharing them with a friend. Not only can you both watch a video at the same time, but you can watch each other watch a video at the same time. The Facebook application can be found here – it is probably the least practical but most widely used option Rounds offers

The second option takes several functions that can be done using other websites and applications – like ChatRoullete and Skype – and puts them in a prettier interface. It comprises an entire social community that Rounds would like to flourish, although so far it has not done anything too incredible. It does, however, present some pretty neat things that other networks like Facebook do not, all of which center around webcam activities. The social community website can be found here.

Rounds offers two other options for utilizing webcams in new ways. The first is through a webcam connection service that operates directly through Chrome, allowing you to create contacts and have video conversations just like you might in Skype or a similar program but all through your Chrome browser as an extension. This is probably the best option the company offers – it really does seem to make a quick chat easier. The final is a gadget for the failed Google Wave project. Most people will not find it too useful, but if they are already involved in the project they may want to fiddle with it. The Chrome extension can be found here and the Wave gadget here.

The webcam may never accomplish what we hoped it would. We might as well enjoy what it can do instead.

You may have noticed the chat interface in the lower right corner of the Facebook website. It indicates that you are online, and displays the number of friends that are online and available for chat.

A click on the chat indicator expands the interface. All online Facebook friends are now shown along with a link to friends lists and the options. The easiest way to drop out of chat is to click on the small green and white switch that you see next to Other Friends. If you click it you go offline and none of your friends will see that you are actually online and available for chat.

You can alternatively click on Options > Go Offline which sets your status to offline until the next time that you click on chat.

The two options so far are there to go completely offline on Facebook, so that no one can see that you are online. Some Facebook users may prefer to stay online for select friends, and offline for others.

Enter Friend Lists. You can create Friend Lists on Facebook group your friends. You may want to create a group for your family, one for work or school, and maybe another for your football buddies or poker group. You can then select to be online or offline for each individual friend list that you have created.

You create a new friend list with a click on chat and the selection of Friend Lists at the top of the window.

Enter a descriptive name for the new group and hit return. It should now appear in the chat listing. Move your mouse cursor over the new list and select the edit link next to it. Edit only appears if you mouse over the new group.

Facebook displays all of your friends in a new overlay window. You can add friends to the selected group with a click on their profile photo. Once you are done click the Save List button to save the list.

You can now go offline selectively so that selected friends will see that you are online and available, while others won’t see that you are online on Facebook.

Have another Facebook tip to share? Let me know in the comments.

Update: Facebook has changed the chat layout recently. You now need to click on the options icon at the bottom row of the chat bar and select Limit Availability from the options.

Facebook displays an overlay window on selection that looks like this.

Here you can then limit your availability by selecting the user groups that you want to be visible for. For that, you need to create friend lists. You cannot do this anymore in the chat interface. For that you need to click on the Friends link in the upper left corner of your Facebook page and then on the Manage Friend List button at the top.

You can then click on the Create List button near the top to create new lists or add friends to existing lists.

Most Facebook users who use the chat stumble upon emoticons by chance, by adding text emoticons to their chat messages that are magically turned into graphics by the chat application on Facebook. There is however no index or toolbar available that shows all the emoticons that are available in the chat.

The userscript Facebook Chat Emoticons Bar adds a toolbar to Facebook’s chat window that displays the available chat emoticons. I’m not a huge fan of emoticons but I know that they are popular.

Lets take a look at the Facebook chat interface once the userscript has been added to the web browser.

All emoticons are added as little images at the top of the Facebook chat bar. You can select them with a click which adds the text emoticon to the chat form at the bottom. The emoticons consist of smileys mainly and several additional options including the option to bold or underline text.

Userscripts are supported by the Firefox web browser if Greasemonkey is installed, by the Google chrome browser and Opera. I have tested the script in Firefox and Google Chrome, and it worked flawlessly in both web browsers. Google Chrome users can install the userscript directly. Opera does not seem to be supported, as only Firefox and Chrome are listed as supported on the userscript profile page.

The Facebook Chat Emoticons Bar can be installed from the userscript website over at userscripts.org. Cautious users may want to read the user comments and take a look at the source code before they install the userscript.

Here are all available text emoticons, handy for those users who do not want to install the userscript, or who use a web browser that does not support those scripts.

:) :( :p :D :o ;) 8) 8| >:( :/ :’( O:) :* <3 ^_^ -_- o.O >:O :v :3 :|] (^^^) :putnam: <(") :42: * _bold_ *

I suggest you enter them all at once in the Facebook chat box to see their effect.

It is ironic that Facebook’s privacy preview feature was used to access the chat and private information of other Facebook users.

All it apparently took to view the live chat for instance was to enter the friend’s name in the “Preview how your profile appears to a specific person:” field to access it. That’s almost to good to be true.

Facebook’s first response was to pull live chat from the site with the promise to bring it back when the privacy hole has been fixed.

For a limited period of time, a bug permitted some users’ chat messages and pending friend requests to be made visible to their friends by manipulating the “preview my profile” feature of Facebook privacy settings. When we received reports of the problem, our engineers promptly diagnosed it and temporarily disabled the chat function. We also pushed out a fix to take care of the visible friend requests which is now complete. Chat will be turned back on across the site shortly. We worked quickly to resolve this matter, ensuring that once the bug was reported to us, a solution was quickly found and implemented.

Both privacy problems seem to have been fixed by now. Chat is available again on Facebook. Will this be the last privacy hole on Facebook? That’s highly unlikely. What’s your take on the story?

Gabtastik is a WebKit based Site Specific Browser (SSB) for web chat services currently in Beta that runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4 or later computers. The Adobe Flash Player is the only other requirement besides an account at Facebook and / or Google Mail.

The beta version does not offered a lot of add-ons over the original chat applications on the websites. We already covered performance and the only two additional features are transparency which can be set in the desktop client and the ability to quickly switch between both chats. But that is more or less also provided in modern browsers where users can simply switch between tabs to do the same.

Interestingly enough the Mac client of Gabtastic in version 0.20 is supporting meebo as well providing access to several Instant Messengers like AIM, MSN and Yahoo while the Windows 0.21 version does not support these yet. The creators definitely have to add more value to the application to make it a must have alternative.