As if Facebook wasn't crackish enough

So according to Techcrunch, Facebook is going to be launching instant messaging (IM) within the website sometime in the near future. From the demo video, it looks like it'll be similar to GChat (IM inside GMail) in its functionality. You will be able to chat away with all of your Facebook friends while you are getting more and more cracked out browsing around the site.


Just when I thought Facebook was already too addictive and occupied too much of my time, now they are adding IM?? I mean I had to fast from it for 40 days just so I couldn't be classified as having a mental disorder. Remember when Facebook first launched and all you had was one profile picture, a list of a few things about yourself, and a "wall" that somebody else could completely erase? Remember when the only schools on it were the Ivys and Stanford so you ended up adding that super nerdy kid from your HS just so your friend count could crack 25? No??? Well maybe that was just me then...

But now on Facebook you can post unlimited pictures, videos and news articles. You can send private messages, write on public walls (wall-to-wall is clean though), compose your own blog entries, form groups with complete strangers, and invite people to events that they wouldn't want to go to even if they didn't live 3,000 miles away. Even the super crackish & stalkery folks (not you but other people I know) can keep tabs on all of their friends and stalkees with the much complained about Newsfeed. I dunno about you, but I kinda like knowing that Jack superpoked Jill. And to top it off, every conceivably annoying application is available for you to add to your profile page so that you can get hacked ("Hey, why is Billy Bob sending me messages about Viagra??").

Unlike GChat though, it appears that Facebook IM will only allow you to talk to other Facebook users. GChat recently leveraged OpenAIM to allow their users to also IM all of their AIM buddies. I haven't opened my AIM client since. But I don't think I'll use Facebook IM all that much because anybody I'd want to talk to, I'm already talking to on GChat. But if they could somehow integrate all of that (yay, more apps!) then maybe I'll become a user...