Facebook Announces Live Chat for Applications

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.
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