I would be impressed if Facebook could just get their act together and fix the damn client.<p>On slow connections (most of those available in 3rd world countries like Jordan where I am now), Facebook chat delivers messages with huge delays (up to 3 minutes) and <i>out of order</i>. You have no idea how disconcerting it is for 'real-time chat' to behave in this manner, and makes it almost unusable.<p>Everyone here starts off Facebook conversations with "why are you not on MSN?" because it's a give that you must have a really good reason to be using Facebook's poorly-engineered excuse for a chat client instead of one of the more mature chat services that actually work as expected.
Do many of you still use IM <i>other than</i> Facebook regularly? I used to, but most of my peers have dropped off AIM/MSN.<p>And perhaps more generally, I've found that Twitter/Facebook let me keep control of my time rather than the synchronous "chat with me now" nature of IM.
I have to admit that I am a little surprised and, quite honestly, a bit frightened that some of you are using facebook chat.<p>Do you no longer have to go to facebook.com to use it or something?
I am more interested in the infrastructure they use to host facebook chat. So far, I just know that they use erlang as the backbone language for facebook chat. Maybe Ejabberd.
Now if only bitlbee would add support for Facebook chat so that those of us who prefer screen+irssi for our IM contacts can keep in touch with those friends who are on Facebook.<p>That's the #1 feature bitlbee is missing, IMHO.