Chit Chat for Facebook is a convenient, desktop based alternative to the standard Facebook chat application. With a user friendly interface it offers an intuitive method of holding conversations with all of your Facebook friends and updates you whenever you receive a new message. While it’s unlikely to prove much use to the lighter Facebook chatters, for the heavy conversationalists this Facebook chat software will prove especially useful and beneficial.
The Facebook chat client has proven problematic for a number of users. It is prone to disappearing when you need it most and because it is essentially an add-on to the main Facebook site it does not offer the same kind of functionality that a dedicated Instant Messenger (IM) offers.
Chit Chat Facebook Integration
Chit Chat integrates well with Facebook. It is specifically designed for the purpose of chatting to your Facebook friends. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software, which is a fairly standard and painless procedure, you can log in using your Facebook credentials. This means you don’t need to create yet another login for yet another site or piece of desktop software. It also means that all of your contacts from Facebook can be imported into your Chit Chat application.
Appearance
Aesthetically, Chit Chat looks a lot like the older versions of MSN Live Messenger so anybody with previous experience of this software will feel quickly at home. Users looking for ways to change the look and feel of the software interface should consider looking elsewhere because while Chit Chat offers a good selection of features for chat it is limited in these user design features.
Contacts
Contacts are categorized, initially as online or offline and you are given the option to add your own category lists and then populate these lists with contacts from your Facebook account.
In the chat window itself you will be presented with a number of floating tabs to represent those conversations that are open at the present time. Clicking on one will take you to your most recent conversation with that contact from where you can read previous posts or join in the conversation. In the conversation pane you can type text, add basic formatting such as bold or italics, and insert a limited number of emoticons but that’s basically it.
Freedom From Your Browser
What Chit Chat gains from running independently to Facebook is the freedom of not having to log in to Facebook. You don’t need to view everybody’s status updates and you won’t be waylaid filling in questionnaires and surveys. You can also log out of Facebook on your browser which can save you a browser tab at the very least.
Posting To Facebook
The integration between the two means that because Chit Chat is essentially logged in to your Facebook account, you can also post messages to your contact’s walls without having to visit the main Facebook site. Right click on a contact’s name and you will be given the option to message them directly or post on their wall.
Saving And Storing Conversations
You can also save your chat conversations in Chit Chat. This provides you with a means to go back and read old conversations either for personal nostalgia or because you’ve forgotten something vital from a conversation with one of your contacts. This can be done quickly and directly from the chat window and can help ensure you never forget or lose vital information.
Chit Chat is a convenient application for those Facebook members that like to chat with friends but, for whatever reason, do not like using the main Facebook chat application.
Who Won’t Appreciate Chit Chat?
If you’re looking for an IM with all the trimmings that allows you to change the skin of the messenger and offers advanced text formatting then Chit Chat is unlikely to be the best solution. Chat applications need to integrate with the main Facebook chat application and because the options on here are limited it means that external applications are similarly limited.
Who Will Appreciate Chit Chat?
However, if you want a pared down version of MSN Windows Messenger that integrates directly with Facebook, allows you to free up a tab in your browser, and offers a few more functions than the standard Facebook Chat apps then Chit Chat could prove to be the ideal solution for you. It is certainly more convenient and the tabbed conversation windows, and desktop alerts make it a useful little tool.
By Matt Jackson
