Facebook Chat: Stop Poking Me!!

Ok, we all know I like Facebook enough to have a friend page and a fan page and I like Mark Zuckerberg enough to be brutalized on stage with him and still walk away smiling. But Facebook chat is annoying.

Feature-wise, I’ve never thought Facebook chat was really that big of a deal. It’s certainly not an innovation. But it seemed a “nice-to-have” feature, especially given the young, always-on customer base that still dominates Facebook. So, kinda “Yawn…nice going guys.”

Then suddenly I realized I was living the equivalent of giving hundreds and hundreds of people my AIM address. Oh no. Facebook! What have you done to my social utility? We’ve suddenly gone from efficiency to distracting, time suck!

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I am just using instant message less and less these days. I just don’t have time for it. It’s intrusive, and I feel bad when I don’t answer someone because they can clearly see that I’m online. At some point during my book-writing process I started just listing myself as “away” but everyone figured it out and “away” became the new “available” for me. Well, everyone except Kevin Rose who sobbingly asked me to “unblock” him last fall. Ok, he wasn’t sobbing, at all. Still, it was a perceived slight, because he knows I’m not away from a computer 24/7 while writing a book.

What’s more, I’ve noticed people I used to chat with for hours are using IM less too. Two years ago, it was a huge reporting tool for me. I have whole transcripts saved with Max Levchin, Mark Andreessen, David Sze, James Hong etc. But at some point we completely stopped communicating that way. Maybe it’s because they blocked me.  (Entirely possible.) Or maybe I’m not alone in my overall “ENOUGH WITH IM” sentiment—particularly now that we have Twitter to make a lot of these conversations more efficient and universal.

MY POINT: The last thing I want on Facebook is a bigger, more intrusive IM client! Everyone who has pinged me so far on Facebook chat is a good friend, whom I love talking to, so please, if you are reading this do not take it personally. I just can handle dozens of you at once! Can’t we just go back to poking and Wall Posts?