Read Facebook chat messages without read notifications

If you are using Facebook's default Messenger application you may have noticed that it sends read notifications automatically whenever you or a chat partner read messages in the app. While that is mighty useful at times, for instance to make sure that your date has indeed received word that you will be late a couple of minutes, it can also be stressful at other times.

Some feel pressured to answer right away when the other party knows that they have read the email, and senders may get irritated when they see that you have read a message but do not respond to it.

Privy Chat for Facebook is a free Android application that serves two main purposes. It first lets you read all Facebook chat messages and access all conversations that you have received in the past without read notifications. This means that you can read new messages without feeling pressured to reply immediately, because senders do not know that you have already read their messages.

You can furthermore retrieve a list of online friends from Facebook to see who is online and who is not.

You need to enter your Facebook login information on first start and allow Privy Chat for Facebook to access your public profile,  messages, chat status, friend's chat status and to manage your messages on the social networking site.

The app displays a list of messages sorted by recency in its interface afterwards. It displays the sender's profile photo, name, part of the message, time and an indicator whether the message has been marked as read or not. A closed eye indicates that the sender has not received read notifications yet, while an open eye means that this is the case.

The read notification is transferred as soon as you reply to a message in the application.

The application has two issues right now. It is currently not possible to start conversations using it. While you can reply to all participants who have messaged you or who you have messaged in the past, you cannot initiate a new conversation. There is also no way to send messages to group conversations.

A second issue is the inability to display some attachments, e.g. images attached to messages.

Verdict

Privy Chat for Facebook is currently only available for Android. It is not the only application available that provides you with that functionality. Most third party Facebook chat clients, for instance those based on Jabber, are not sending read notifications when you are using them. (via Smartdroid)

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