Over the weekend eBuddy announced support for Facebook chat. This means that anybody can now visit m.ebuddy.com and easily access their Facebook chat account. The service lets you see who is currently online and send messages to them in real-time. While Facebook already launched chat support via their iPhone application, there currently is no chat service that works on all mobile phones.
This new application by eBuddy is web-based which means that any mobile phone can access the application through their browser and they are good to go. Ultimately it would be more efficient to have a separate application for phones like Blackberry so that the chat can run non-stop in the background. For now, this service by eBuddy will have to suffice.
It will be interesting to see if instant messaging on mobile devices will compete with SMS, the traditional mobile messaging standard. Chat makes it easy to send a text message to anybody no matter where they live. That’s probably the one advantage that mobile instant messaging has.
