What is making news in this sea of social networking sites is the new information that Facebook is building chat rooms for its users, who are counted to be more than a billion. The biggest competition to FB chat room will be Google’s own Hangouts feature available on Google Plus. Facebook is testing out a new feature known as ‘Host Chat’ that will help you create and host chat rooms within FB.
This being said, there are a number of chat applications already within Facebook. OpenChatRoom, LiveChatRoom, etc., are third party apps available in Facebook for the same purpose. These chat applications are not however so popular although they are on a platform of a billion users.
One of the reasons chat rooms disappeared was because they got riddled with spam and bot accounts and it was impossible to find out who you are chatting with. The person on the other side may well be a bot or an Internet Predator that provides nothing of value to you. Slowly, but inevitably, chat rooms alienated their users until a point came when there were more bots than users.
Facebook Host Chat will be featured on the top near your status update section as shown here.
When you host a chat room, you will have the capability to add people into the room; set a topic, event, or project for discussion. Your friends may be able to join in without an invite. Also, the developments within the chat room may be posted on the timeline. Right now, FB reports the chat feature has only the capability to work with text and no audio or video.
Just as Graph search, Host Chat feature will come out of the Beta phase and be available to all of us soon. Let’s wait till then.