Manage Facebook Chat

Facebook is getting more and more popular which isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. However, the built-in instant messenger can be a pain in the butt.  The fact that it defaults to ON for all users doesn’t help matters. Sometimes you just want a quick look at the recent statuses without the world knowing you’re online and available to chat…

Turn It Completely Off

Turn off chat. Seriously, that solves the problem right? It is easily disabled from the chat window’s options:

Easily re-enabled the same way as well.

Note: After you’ve turned off chat it’ll automatically turn back on if you click the chat window… be careful with that.

Selectively Hide

You can group your friends and then selectively enable/disable their ability to spot you on Facebook chat. Creating groups for your friends isn’t immediately intuitive, hopefully I can help.

In the top menu click on “Friends”, then in the left side bar find “Friends” under lists and click it (this may be a direct link)… At the top of your page is a Create New List button. Hiding from folks at work? Call the new list “co-workers” and add those co-workers all to the list.

Now, in the chat window you’ll see a little on/off toggle:

Use Facebook Lite

Facebook Lite has been around for a few weeks (I think?) and is still in beta. It loads fast, doesn’t have all the crapstuff in the sidebars and — most importantly — doesn’t have the chat and notification widgets in the footer of the page. Great tool for a quick peek at the side bar.

And Finally…

If you’re in a situation where you don’t want people to see you logging into Facebook, then maybe you shouldn’t log in! Regardless of what I’ve been told at work, nobody has a “right” to see Facebook from the office.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Facebook Chat Everywhere
2. Facebook for Windows Mobile.
3. My dream chat plug-in
4. Facebook Privacy
5. Google service to blend gmail and chat features