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I don’t have any idea why this was launched nearly a month ago and I am just finding it, but I think Facebook Chat is a pretty cool idea… and NOT because it’s “CHAT”.

Nevermind that TechCrunch somehow knew about Facebook Chat and I didn’t… must have been that day twitter was down..

First a few screenshots:

The first shows my facebook homepage, with a new “toolbar” along the bottom and a notifications window that pops up:

The second screenshot is a closeup of the status box, showing 9 online friends… 3 active, and 6 idle… and their statuses:

End of the day, I like this tool simply because its providing a drop-dead simple way to:

• Touch in with people simply
• Find out what’s happening in my network
• Communicate with people as-needed in the same place I find them (it is inefficient to use one tool to locate someone and then another tool to communicate with them when you find them!)

I don’t know if FB CHAT has additional features, but I would like it to:

• Integrate with my existing IM client… let me be online via FB chat or another IM tool, and let people find me through their own vector of accessing it.
• Integrate with twitter… or at least FacebookMobile. send me a FB chat and DM it to my twitter client or FB registered cell phone.