Today Facebook is announcing the launch of live chat integration for Facebook applications. It’s a simple integration but it could prove to be powerful for real-time applications. According to Facebook, “With the new fb:chat-invite tag, you can display a list of a user’s online friends and allow the user to invite a friend to chat. Like with the multi-friend selector, you can customize which friends should / shouldn’t appear in this list using the exclude-ids parameter.”
What this doesn’t provide is real-time chat with the application developers. Instead, it’s a way for applications to initiate chat among a user’s friends to encourage them to participate in whatever activity the application is encouraging. We’ve included a screenshot of the integration below which is from Playfish’s extremely popular Pet Society application.
Currently this feature is limited to those applications which use standard FBML but an XFBML/iframe version will soon be available. If you have an iFrame application you can currently wrap the tag in some FBJS code and it should work appropriately. Rather than using the traditional invitation functionality, you can now prompt users to invite their friends via chat.
For more details check out the fb:chat-invite wiki page.
Pet Society Integration
Live Chat Invite Demo
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It's really easy to implement! Here's one of the first apps to use chat invites:
apps.facebook.com/friend_score/index.php?view=invite&ref=allfb
Comment by Jakob Keller — March 5, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
Sorry, this link works:
http://apps.facebook.com/friend_score/index.php?v...
Comment by Jakob Keller — March 5, 2009 @ 3:52 pm
will this work with pages too?
Comment by Regan — March 5, 2009 @ 4:36 pm
Great. Chat spam.
Comment by Eric Godfrey — March 5, 2009 @ 7:43 pm
facebook lately launched a 'verification' program to sort out the 'well behaving' apps. yet, it seems they have abandoned developers who paid USD 375 to join, just look: forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=29721
they are not even telling us when they will launch the program (let alone that we don't even know what we paid for). i would like someone to cover this if possible, it's totally ridiculous treatment. plus facebook never responds to developers unless some big site forces them to
Comment by gmaning — March 6, 2009 @ 1:44 am
Any plan to integrate it in Facebook Connect?
Comment by Sebastien Provencher — March 6, 2009 @ 6:26 am
Great stuff from Facebook, just too good for twitter and them lot
Comment by Daniel Adams — March 6, 2009 @ 11:45 am
any plains to integrate this into facebook connect?
Comment by Tim — March 18, 2009 @ 9:20 am
Race is one of those topics where it is almost impossible for a person to come to the table with an open mind. ,
Comment by Sad80 — October 22, 2009 @ 4:07 pm
I want facebook live chat application.how to get this?
Comment by Ganesh joshi — July 28, 2011 @ 2:36 am