Facebook chat is a light-weight Instant Messaging (IM) Tool integrated directly into your Facebook account. It allows you to chat with all your Facebook friends without having to download or install any plugins or software. Launched way back in April 2008, Facebook chat has been growing at a tremendous rate. Back in June 2009, Facebook announced that Facebook Chat sends more than 1 Billion Messages per day.Its been more then a year now, and considering how much facebook has grown this year, those figures are bound to have skyrocketed.
Keeping that in mind, I have compiled few tips and tricks that will help to bring the best out of your Facebook chat.
Here is a video by Puremango that has instructions to get your friend’s recent chat history even if your friend is offline. Facebook stores chat history for only a few days, and after that the chats are irretrievable.
There are few extensions in Firefox and Chrome that helps to store FbChat history in your local environment.
The instructions to install the plugins in either Google Chrome or Firefox can be found here – Save Complete Facebook Chat History.
If you want to hide your online status on Facebook, here is a small trick that will work like a charm.
Facebook has the feature of creating friend lists onto your chat window. If you want to create a friend list, log on to your facebook account, click on the “Chat” button on the lowermost right corner. Then Click on “Friend Lists” and you will find an option called “Create a new list”. Create a list with a name of your choice, something like “Friends I don’t talk” or “Always Offline” or “Others”. After you have created the list, it will instantly appear in the main chat box. Now drag all the people from whom you want to hide your online status or whom you want to block. After you are done with the creating the list and adding people to it, find a Green Tab next to the List Name. Click on it, and you will appear offline to all the people who are in that list.
Click on the same button (now grey) to again appear online to the list.
Facebook Chat currently doesn’t have any option to send files directly from your Facebook chat window. If you want to send a file, you either need to email the recipient or upload it in some file sharing sites. Both the methods are very lengthy and time-consuming.
However, to make life a whole lot easier, there are IMs like Digsby, Adium, Nimbuzz which allows you to send files directly through your Facebook chat account. All you need to do is download their respective messengers and add your Facebook account to it and use the, ‘send file’ option.
Video chat in Skype and Google Chat is common these days but wondering if it is possible in FbChat? No problem, we have a solution. There is a Facebook application which allows us to video chat with our Facebook friends. This application isn’t powered by Facebook instead by TokBox. TokBox is a Flash-enabled browser plugin that doesn’t require any downloads or setup process to work. All you need to do is download the TokBox plugin (Firefox extension), then you will see Video Chat option beneath your Facebook Chat friends’ names. You should then tell the application to allow access to the webcam and wallah! you can video chat with your Facebook buddies.
I’m sure many of you have tried smileys in FbChat. Here is the complete list of all the Smileys/Emotions that Facebook supports.
Note that the emotions are different from FbChat if you are using another IM Client to access FbChat (like Digsby, Trillion, Adium, Meebo etc)
If you are using Firefox, then it is possible to place your Facebook Chat box at the side bar instead of it being at the bottom.
There are rumors that Facebook is going to launch Facebook Voice Chat soon. We will be updating this post if any new news is made official. Follow us at @fortystones
If you have any more tips or tricks that you want to share with us, please feel free to comment below.