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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> everyone was there

This is exactly why I turned chat off. I have no desire to be contacted by old high school classmates who happen to be bored and browsing facebook, and see me pop up.

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Yes but people who are bored and browsing Facebook and don't follow technology minute by minute, outnumber people like us by a huge margin. Facebook launching these three (not so new) features just means that its making video calling more accessible to other people, which means its probably going to work for them.

(Personally, I still feel surprised whenever I see anyone even using Facebook chat.)

I use Facebook chat to talk to close friends because sometimes it's more convenient than picking up a phone to talk to someone out of the country. Allows for more random conversations. Having the Skype feature is an added bonus, no one's requiring you to use it. Just because FB chat is more buggy, that doesn't mean the convenience doesn't highly outweigh the disadvantages. Logging into a different chat client would be for chat-only, while FB isn't.

It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.

You can set up a friends list, and turn on chat only for that friends list, if you like. Set up the friends list at https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and then click the little settings icon at the bottom right (in the new chat design) and choose "Limit availability...".

With the old chat design, choose chat at the bottom right, then the "Friend lists" menu item in the chat window, and add the friends list you want to affect chat availability, and then turn availability on/off to particular lists.

Useful for parents and work colleagues who don't use other IM or who you don't want to give your personal IM accounts to.

I think this discussion made me realize that I want there to be a minimum barrier to contacting me in a way that requires instant feedback. I don't care who has my e-mail address because I can reply to e-mail on my own time and terms, but I'd rather people have to do a little work to contact me via IM, and I want it to be pretty hard for people to casually call me just to chat.

Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.

Sure, but that's extra work, and the people I'd allow to see my presence generally can reach me in other ways.

Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.

I assume you mean FB lists, as the groups feature is quite different. /pedantic

Oops. Me bad. FB lists it is.

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