It was this very month, in fact this very week of May when Facebook was opened up to my university among others in the UK. Judging from my profile ID (223400006) I’d like to think I was #6 to sign up. Facebook has changed immensely since, and not always for the good. From opening up to general public to releasing the Application Platform, an old school user (I’m not talking about me) wouldn’t recognise the Facebook he/she saw today from the one back then. However this isn’t a post to bitch about ‘features’ I dislike. Instead I’ll talk about where I see Facebook headed, or want to see it headed.

As it stands now, Facebook is pretty popular Social networking platform. I have all my friends on here and I can see what they have been upto in a variety of ways. Their photos, reading their walls, their notes (blog posts), events they are attending and most importantly status updates. I can find out common interests too by looking at their profile or the outlandish groups they join. Communication is done via public wall posts or Messaging, which Facebook hopes will replace email but more on that later.

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I tried Digsby earlier on in March and was quite impressed with it but since I’ve never really used a multitude of Instant messaging platforms I didn’t really care for it. I’m only on Google Talk and WLM/MSN Messenger and running those two clients was perfectly fine by me. However on May 1 Digsby announced support for Facebook chat. I strongly believe Facebook Chat has a strong potential of becoming the biggest IM provider as the approach of building IM around a social network makes more sense than the traditional approach of doing it the other way around. So this made me take the plunge and drop the GTalk client (sorry Google <3).

The feature list is really extensive so I’m not going to go through it all. I will go through some of the main ones though. Firstly, it has supposed for all major IM platforms( MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat). In addition you can configure multiple email accounts in the client, and that’s not just notification , it’s complete control (open, delete, forward, mark as read etc). Facebook stalkers enthusiasts will love the Social networking feature which lets you receive updates from Facebook (other social networks supported too). This can get pretty extensive actually, I ended up unsubscribing from that as it was an overload. There’s a lot more you can do with it, writing about it all will result in a really long boring post.

You can really customize the application and it’s appearance a great deal, right from buddy list to conversation window. The way I’ve set it up now is it connects to my Gtalk account, Facebook account, Twitter account and retrieves email from my two Gmail accounts. Still haven’t given up on MSN because believe it or not, I like the client. However should it exceed my bloat tolerance threshold I won’t have qualms about dumping it.

If nothing else, it’s a good enough client for Facebook Chat. Give it a spin. They have a new build as well.

http://www.digsby.com