Facebook is testing chat presence dots in the News Feed. These dots show the chat status of your friends, clicking on it will open up a message thread. This is presumably being done to provide a boost to Facebook’s online messaging service. The testing is only being conducted on desktop at this stage, chat dots have been rolled out to a limited number of users. It is a very convenient way of letting people know which of their friends are available to chat, but one can’t say for sure whether Facebook would roll this out for over 1 billion of its users.
The messaging niche is quite saturated as it is. There are popular cross platform solutions such as Kik, Viber and WhatsApp, platform limited solutions like BBM and iMessage. The green chat dots would serve as another reminder for users to see which of their friends are online, and would hopefully keep users tied to Facebook’s messaging service. Dots will be displayed beside status updates in the News Feed. It is not known as of now when Facebook intends to make these chat dots live across the network for all users.
[Image via CNET]
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