I was pretty loudly proclaiming to colleagues and friends how Facebook Chat would be a pretty useless addition to the platform. Well, I’m patting myself on the back because it appears as if I got it right. Facebook Chat is pretty useless – for the win.
Ok, so maybe I didn’t really need to go that far out on a limb to make this prediction. Instead, I used common sense. You see, there’s already a few instant messenger platforms that handle chat. You may have heard of Google Talk, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, Skype, Gadu-Gadu, Meebo, ICQ, Jabber, and a few dozen more that collectively amount to over 1 billion registered users. Even with their 60 million users, it’s not hard to see that Facebook has a lot to overcome to be relevant in this space.
Now, the reviews are coming in from Tech Blog big shots. Do we really need another IM? Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb thinks “Probably not.” Michael Arrington from Techcrunch also points out that with “no integration of AIM, Gtalk, or any other protocol yet,” it makes the Facebook Chat another “walled garden.”
Why then, would Facebook come late into a mature market with a technology platform that doesn’t play well with others? Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is starting to believe some of the “can-do-no-wrong” hype around Facebook. In a 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl told Zuckerberg “you seem to be replacing Larry and Sergei.” Stahl continues to refer to Facebook as, among other things, an “internet revolution” and the “biggest thing since Google.”
The fact of the matter is – we don’t really need another chat platform. Facebook is the poster child for user generated content and Web 2.0 community, but will not surpass Google as the primary online communication, online commerce engine, and information dissementation platform used by people throughout the world. I would have rathered Facebook spend less time trying to prove how cool they are – “there’s a dude on a unicycle – how rad!,” less time explaining how unaffected they are (Zuckerberg claims to sleep on a mattress laying on the floor.), and more time coming up with new innovative ideas that might actually lend credence to all the posturing and hype thrown at the company. Then again, I’m not the one being interviewed by 60 Minutes . . .
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cEySyEnxvU]
