Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Facebook Chat: A poke too far?

My sister, Suman, is late to the party that is social networking. At 29, she graduated before Facebook became the big man on campus it is today and left high school while MySpace was still a twinkle in Tom Anderson's eye.

In the last month, she's joined both networks, muddled them up in her head and failed in her attempts to stay relevant by referring to each as MyFace. (I had to stop her from inviting friends to meet there. It was a conversation I never wanted to have with my sister.)

Just as Suman's getting to know Facebook (and her friends in a more intimate way than she imagined), I'm trying to distance myself from the social network that's costing UK business over £130m a day and 233 million hours of 'lost time' every month.

I'll be running for the hills when it rolls out its new instant messaging feature in the next couple of weeks. It's hitting some networks and the reviews are pretty good, but Facebook's already given me a second inbox to battle, not to mention another Wall to climb, and I'm terrified that I'll never keep up with friends, nor will I want to know that they're getting a sandwich, packing for their holidays or being surprised at the result of a football match, reality TV show or STD test.

It's hard enough trying to sneak onto Facebook without someone noticing that you haven't replied to their message ("oh, I haven't checked," doesn't really work). Now its new chat features promise to bring back into fashion a certain keyboard shortcut dance I used to perform when avoiding friends on instant messengers. (If I log on and then off immediately, you'll know what just happened...)

It's not too late for my sister, Suman - she's not yet hooked. However, by making Facebook a more real time experience, its developers are hoping session length will go through the roof. But it might just be the poke that pushes users, like me, over the edge.

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