New Facebook Chat: An example of social media going anti-social

Within the past couple days, Facebook rolled out new functionality for its chat application.  The old system only allowed you to be "online" or "offline" for chat purposes -- there was no in between.  So either all your friends were able to chat with you, or none of them were.

With the new functionality (see official Facebook blog post here, and AllFacebook.com explanation here), now you can allow certain groups to see you online and chat with you, while appearing offline and inaccessible for chat with others.  Now you're in control of who can and can't chat with you.

This isn't new technology or a new idea.  You've been able to appear offline to certain users or certain groups within IM applications for a long time.  But this is groundbreaking for Facebook.

Thanks to this change, I'm sure there will be plenty of people I'll never see in my Facebook chat window again.  I guarantee some people will only allow chatting with a specific circle of their friends.  And people will be able to go "into hiding" a lot easier, where they're chattable to only one or two people, while the rest of the world can't see they're online.

Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but this feature sounds more anti-social to me.  It'll make avoiding particular people on Facebook a lot easier.  But if you don't want to talk to certain people on Facebook, why are you friends with them?  (That's a rhetorical question)

Even though I call the new Facebook Chat anti-social, it certainly has its benefits.  Will I use it?  No doubt I will.  But that doesn't make it any less anti-social.

Photo by r-z