Facebook chat is sexy and well implemented—we didn’t expect any less from them. Adding more communication features is a great way to increase the “stickiness” of the Facebook experience and drive up engagement (and therefor page views). But being a late entrant into IM with an ulterior motive makes f-Chat a tough sell as anyone’s primary IM protocol.

I don’t chat with most of my Facebook friends, and for the ones whom I do, I prefer to do on a sleeker desktop/blackberry client.

Obviously opening the protocol defeats the “stickiness” strategy, but leaving it closed will make it second rate, no more than an afterthought.

Shouldn’t they have made a serious email offering instead?

Let people opt into an external @fbook.com and slowly enhance the messaging features into full-blown email? A full-blown email service tightly integrated with social networking can easily occupy a big chunk of my personal web traffic.  That’s the kind of walled garden that people can get trapped in and still like it.