Facebook Chat Gets Enhanced Friends List, Popup Alerts

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 12 May 2009

Popular social networking site Facebook, which recently made the headlines for not taking firm action against Holocaust denial groups (but we are not going to touch this subject with a broom stick, and neither will Facebook who said these groups do not violate its terms), has now announced enhancements to its chat platform (now that’s a subject that is right our alley).

The Facebook Chat enhancements I mentioned above are:
- You can now control which of your friends see you as being online, and which see you as being offline thanks to the filtering option included in Facebook Chat.
- You will receive notifications related to actions taken by people on Facebook, actions related to you. These notifications come in the form of a popup in Facebook Chat.

Rob Goodlatte comments on the Facebook Chat filtering feature: “Since we launched Facebook Chat, many of you have asked for ways to organize your connections and to control which friends see you online. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. You can now do that by using Friend Lists to filter your connections in Chat. Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings. From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.

Arjun Banker provides a comment on the second Facebook Chat enhancement, the popup notifications one: “Notifications let you know when people take actions on Facebook related to you, so you can quickly check out a photo you've been tagged in or read a new posting on your Wall. They already are available from your home page or from the notifications icon within the Facebook Chat bar at the bottom of your browser, but we want to make sure you know immediately when your friends are sharing something new with you. When you are online with Facebook Chat, entire notifications will appear automatically and in real time above the Chat bar as pop-up alerts. For instance, if a friend has written on your wall, you'll see a new notification appear. After a few seconds, the notification will automatically disappear, but you'll still be able to see a list of all of your notifications when you click on the notifications icon. You'll also continue to see a count of all the notifications you've not yet viewed, indicated in red.”


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