Facebook, Why Did You Screw Your Chat System?

By now you’re probably one of the 500 million people who have noticed the new Facebook chat. Which means that one or more of these three words may be in your mind: Sucks. Stupid. Here’s our lightning review:

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Before, Facebook’s chat showed only the people you wanted on the chat window. In fact, of those people, only the ones who were online showed up. Maybe it was that way because it made bloody sense. You know, so they can actually reply to you. You write. They reply. We chat. In real time.

That was all good.

But the new design completely ignores the nature of chatting in favour of this moronic idea that chatting is actually like emailing, but shorter. Or vice versa. Whatever the hell. Which is why they merged their chat and messages into a single inbox. To Facebook this may make sense. To the users, it’s just stupid and it results in a total waste of space, a clusterzuck of names that doesn’t serve any purpose but confuse them.

Instead of presenting you with the people who you want to chat with, those who are actually online, Facebook now shows a long list of people full of everyone. Everyone meaning whoever the bollocking hell Facebook guesses you may be interested in chatting with. And all of them show up, no matter if they are online or not. So clever!

Let’s admit that the concept of Facebook guessing who you may want to chat with could be OK (in practice, most of Facebook’s guesses are dumbtastically useless). Why oh why do we have to see everyone regardless of their status. They mark those who are online with a green dot, but otherwise most of the people in the list are almost never there.

But the stupidity doesn’t stop there, no. While Facebook says that they will not show you as “available” to the people who are not in one of your active chat lists, they present you with those people anyway. Why the hell do I want to see someone in the list who is specifically excluded from seeing me online?

Hopefully, they will fix this moronic user experience soon. They can easily fix it by adding two options: “Show only online friends” and “Show only people in xxxx list”.

Image via Reddit


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