Just what we need, Mark Zuckerberg. Another IM service, even if it’s just within the Facebook realm. Why poke your friends when you can annoy them on IM instead?

Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington had the scoop on Facebook’s latest means of staying in the news. It’s also due very soon – likely in the next month, or week if we’re lucky (or unlucky).

To clarify, the Facebook IM app will be like any standard Facebook app – no desktop software has been mentioned, so it’ll work like the Social.IM app. Looks like Social.IM might just have to start with the funeral arrangements already.

The reports are slightly confusing – it’ll likely be built on Jabber’s open source platform but will not be Jabber-compliant initially. Sounds like Facebook wants to keep it Facebook-only for as long as it can. Won’t stop people from building APIs or hacks to get it to work with Jabber or other platforms.

It would be nice for this to be something you could subscribe to on Meebo, for instance. Why have an IM service? Will this be direct competition with MSN, Yahoo and AIM? What this app will probably do is give us just one more reason to be logged into Facebook as often as we probably already are.

IM in a social network is nothing new. MySpace already has its own IM service and AOL’s announced it plans to integrate one into its newly purchased Bebo.

Besides the death of other IM apps, Facebook’s new feature asks the question as to what else they’re going to offer without crippling the network’s performance. Friendster rang its own death knell by being unable to scale performance with their user growth. By the time loading times were bearable again, most of their users had defected to other networks. Now, the next betting pool will be on when Microsoft finally scraps Spaces for full-on integration with Facebook instead.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 12:40 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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