Over the past few days, facebook has slowly rolled out a brand new chat feature.

From the looks of it, it seems very similar to gmail chat in that your chat window stays within the browser along the bottom.  I’ve had a handful of conversations using it, and it seems to be working fine.

CNN.com posted an article today about the launch of new feature, and I was fortunate enough to be asked about the launch and about social networking sites in general.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/08/facebook.chat/index.html

Now the real question is, will the introduction of facebook chat slowly render AIM obsolete?  With more and more messaging programs moving to in-browser format, will client-based chat programs become a thing of the past?

Personally, even though I still have AIM logged in on my home computer, I find that I’m using it less and less while I am increasing my usage of programs like g-chat within Google.  I feel that the introduction of facebook chat will only augment that further.  Remember AIM profiles?  Perhaps it’s only me, but I never check AIM profiles anymore.  When AIM 6.0 came out and you could now hover over a screen name to see an away message and it negated the need to right-click to view the away message on the profile.  Now we’ve moved to an age where facebook and myspace profiles have been the thing to replace AIM profiles.

It’s interesting to think about the years ahead and how we’re going to continue to evolve in this idea of “staying connected”.  I remember how excited I was when got my own e-mail address when I was about twelve and how I built my own website on Tripod.  Now, things like e-mail, facebook and the Internet are so ingrained in our culture that we’re now more “connected” then we ever were before.  Is it for the better?  Hopefully.