OMG. Facebook just ate my morning with its live Chat launch

I booted up my laptop this morning and saw that Facebook has launched live Chat. At first glimpse it looks very cool. This launch has just happened over night. But then, within minutes, 7 friends started chatting to me, and without batting an eyelid I lost a chunk of my morning. A nice loss, but Facebook has just unveiled its time sink.

The way it works is you just log on to Facebook and the chat options are in the bottom right. It tells you which of your friends are online and their chat bubbles pop up as and when they get in touch.

Beware. People around you are about to go quiet while they discover Facebook Chat today. 

Comments

[Melanie Seasons]

I like the idea, but they still have some kinks to work out. Mainly:

-A way to be selectively invisible
-An idle status
-A way to pop the chat window out of the Facebook homepage

I may be missing it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do any of those things...

[Sally]

I also can't see that conversations are stored, which makes it way less useful than MSN for me - I like to have archives of work chat and interviews.

[Chris Norton]

I agree with you. The same thing happened to me yesterday with several people trying to chat with me which is fine but sometimes you just don't have the time. I twittered about it yesterday as I feel this might cause more employers to ban their employees from using FB. Let's hope not because it does have its uses.