Facebook Chat to Messaging Chatbar

With their last video chatting upgrade, Facebook has changed their chat for a messaging chatbar. This new chatbar isn't meant to be used to chat with your friends, but to see friends you message you the most and offer an easier access to your inbox. According to the Facebook Help Center,

The sidebar lets you quickly contact some of the friends you message most. Just clicking on a friend’s name opens a chat window. If your friend isn’t available to chat, you can still send messages for them to read later.

How you know a friend is available to chat:

• Friends with a green dot next to their names are available to chat
  
• Friends with a gray moon next to their names are available but inactive
  
• Friends with no icon next to their names are unavailable

The sidebar is sensitive to the amount of free space you have on your screen, so it only appears if there’s enough room for it. If you don’t see the sidebar, just click Chat in the bottom right corner of your screen, which shows the same list of friends you’ll find in your sidebar.

This new chatbar has also changed the way you can use Friend Lists to select what friends you want to be online for.

Since the list of friends in your sidebar now updates dynamically based on who you interact with, it is no longer organized by friend list. You can still use friend lists to limit your availability to certain friends (by clicking the Limit Availability... option).

Do you like or dislike this upgrade? IMO, it's awful. It's no longer a chat but just a "simpler" access to your inbox, meaning that you can't really chat with friends anymore.

i found it really annoying, although it displays most contacted users... what about the other 100+ users (who are probabaly online) that you want to drop a message to.

its A BIG HASSLE to type in the user in the search box to find him/her especially if you're unsure that he/she's even online...

so the bar displays like 20 or so online users... facebook just makes it a pain to get in touch with other users who aren't on that list...

maybe its time to jump ship... XD

i think you should bring back the old chat box... the new chat box is so confusing and i cant find my group members... the older chatbox was good and nice.. kthnxbye..

Honestly, out of all changes FB has made over time, I had not hated one as much as this change.

I don't mind the bar itself as much as I mind the problems with showing who is online and who it is not. If it were just the bar, I would get used to such ugliness in due time but the offline/online thing is just TOO HUGE to ever ignore for me. Now people won't randomly after a long time of not talking say "hi" to you because they don't see you online and I won't say "hi" to them either because I won't see them.

This is like the worst time ever to implement such a thing when Google+ is starting to make some competition.

many people now askin on what is happening on the chat box.... we dont like it so much... like me i cant see all the 135 online people... we much more like the old ones... hayzzz..... why did u change it ? can u explain?

the one thing that is bothering me the most, is the fact that chat is playing a very annoying "game" ... you see a friend who's marked as online, and when you actually open the window to say "hello" it tells you that he/she's "unavailable" are they online or not????!!!! I've never given much thought to the upgrades to be honest but this one is really getting heavy now!!! and by the way...there are no more email notices on my personal email that I have a message from my friends neither!!! My suggestion...bring everything back as it was please

I see that most people are saying for us "the forum" to bring back the old facebook etc. We can not do that.

Poke wrote: We can not do that.

Uhmmm Poke....it was just voicing an opinion linked to the question...I was not asking the "Forum" to change it I already sent a couple of times feedback and suggestions directly to FB Help Centre, don't worry...it's the first thing I did but no feedback

Jojo I was not talking about you...and I only meant two people wanted "the forum" to change it back. Maybe you should read their comments then you can see why I made the first comment.

Its not great.

I found a google chrome extension to revert it back to the old one!

Much better!

I don't like it whatsoever it's very annoying, I can't go offline when I don't want to talk to people, it's just a mess

tom.lovick wrote:Its not great.

I found a google chrome extension to revert it back to the old one!

Much better!

Does it work?

I don't like that chats are now saved as messages. Chats were supposed to me for impromptu conversations, not for comments that you wanted archived.

I like it.I have no proble with it!