Facebook is making things convenient and fun for us. That is why their new Facebook Chat functionality will probably gain some popularity soon. After all, its fun. You can now put your friends avatars in your chat talk. The question is: will you recognize them?
Facebook launched this feature last week and it works pretty cool. If you type in one of your friends name in the chat, within double brackets, you will see the thumbnail of your friend appear.
Here’s how it works:
1. Start chatting with someone.
2. Refer to a mutual friend or, a brand (State of Search for example), you type their profile id or name into double brackets. So, that would be [[stateofsearch]] for our logo, [[jackiehole]] for Jackie Hole and [[basvandenbeld]]for me.
I tested it out with Jackie Hole earlier today:
Oh, you can also try these profiles to use some different kind of ‘smileys’ in your chat…
But consider this
Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? Now there are a few things to consider in this nice feature.
First of all: how well do you know your friends? You will see A LOT of thumbnails come by if you talk like this. You might not recognize all of them right away. So you will have to be sure you know who your friend is talking about.
Secondly: why is Facebook doing this? It could “just” be a nice feature. But think about this: this function might just have people think about what profile picture they are using a little bit more. Maybe something which is easily recognizable, like your photo…
Google wants us to be more ‘open’ about who we are on Google+, which means for example you have to use your real name. Facebook never asked for something like that. Maybe they don’t need to, because they do it like this…
