Facebook has a new chat function now. That must have been what they were installing when the servers were down for an hour two earlier this week.

While you’re in Facebook doing anything, you have a new little status bar at the bottom, with a box for your availability and another box that says how many of your friends are online. You can click that, pick their name, and chat with them right from within Facebook, without having to have any other program. Best of all, you can minimize the chat windows and you’ll get a tiny red box popping up with the number of unread messages you’ve received. That helps keep the chat box from getting in the way while you’re working on your next bingo in Scrabulous or whatever. :-)

Kinda neat, seems to work well, and is a nice value-added feature. :-)