Facebook Chat hits 1B messages per day | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Chat hits 1B messages per day

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20 pointsjbyers22 comments

I would be impressed if Facebook could just get their act together and fix the damn client.

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 out of order. You have no idea how disconcerting it is for 'real-time chat' to behave in this manner, and makes it almost unusable.

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 other than Facebook regularly? I used to, but most of my peers have dropped off AIM/MSN.

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 hardly use Facebook chat at all. Most of my actual friends use Gtalk/Jabber.

Me too. And almost none of my friends use Facebook chat either. Is MSN/Yahoo something that caught on among younger people in the US?

The fact that we're posting on this site is pretty good proof that we're not a good example of the average user.

I still use Gchat and either talk to people directly through it or on AIM. I only know of one other person like you where Facebook chat is the main way to talk online.

Meebo. I'm religious about the cloud, and I love having my chat transcripts available for searching regardless of what network my friends use.

I rarely if ever talk through FB chat, even after setting up the facebook plugin. It's much less reliable than GTalk (even AIM beats it out), so I try to default to other means.

I use Pidgin or Digsby and split my conversations between MSN, Jabber, and Facebook.

I think I have used facebook chat exactly once. It was something along the lines of

"wtf is this thing popping up on the bottom of my screen!?" followed by me closing it.

I keep dreaming about that one nice day in the near future where the "I use this service" or "I use that service" discussions will be made irrelevant due to standardization and federation. XMPP, get behind it please.

I have to admit that I am a little surprised and, quite honestly, a bit frightened that some of you are using facebook chat.

Do you no longer have to go to facebook.com to use it or something?

Pidgin has a plugin that supports it, Adium has it built-in, and Meebo and Digsby officially support it.

Yeah, with Adium and combined contacts, it's just another service that I've got plugged in and don't even think about. I've got a friend that signs into Facebook or AIM almost always mutually exclusively, but they're just "online" to me, regardless of the medium.

Okay that makes sense then.

I honestly still thought that it was just a popup on the website...hearing that the HN community (which I consider to be one of the most 'with it' around) was using it was crushing to me.

I wonder how this compares to the volume of other popular services.

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.

they keep promising xmpp but who knows really =/

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.

That's the #1 feature bitlbee is missing, IMHO.

I continue to use Adium with AIM/MSN but now 90% of my chat is through facebook.

I've been using facebook chat almost exclusively for friends I've made in the last year.

MSN/Yahoo for older friendships.

I don't like facebook chat very much, though it generally works so maybe I shouldn't complain.

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