We’ve been spelunking for applications on Facebook (more news coming soon), and just noticed the Messenger page on Facebook:
8,115,283 monthly active users, not bad!
How has your experience with Facebook integration been going? We’ve noticed a couple of things right off:
Toast, Toast, and more Toast! If you have a number of Facebook friends, you must have noticed that your pop up notifications (toast) have increased dramatically. Alfred Thompson, who works at Microsoft with Academic Relations, commented on being able to watch his friends and co-workers Facebook check in habits:
When a friend of mine opens up Facebook I see a little pop up that says “so and so in now available in Facebook chat.” I’m wondering how some people are going to react to see who and when different of their friends are opening Facebook. Now I open Facebook during the day for work purposes (checking the official Microsoft Facebook page and the Microsoft Tech Students on Facebook page). That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
But seriously its not a big issue as social media is part of my role at work and I am trusted with flexible work hours. But for many people it is a big issue. So now people who have messenger open can see who is on Facebook without opening Facebook themselves.
Unfortunately you can’t specifically turn off Facebook notifications (feature request?!), however you can use this workaround – in Tools>Options>Notifications, uncheck “Any friend signs into Messenger”, and create a list of Favorites that you do want notifications for:
This dramatically dropped the amount of toast we were seeing, and you can still check in Messenger to see if your Facebook friends are online.
Timeouts? Not sure about this one, but often we open a conversation window and leave it open, coming back to it every few minutes or longer. Facebook friends seem to drop offline in Messenger (although they are still online in Facebook). It looks like there is a timeout feature that cuts off conversations after so many minutes of inactivity.
Where are they, really? Another annoyance is that our Favorites (those that are both Windows Live and Facebook friends) appear as online in our Favorites section even when they are only online in Facebook. This kind of negates the purpose of “appear offline”, as the mere act of checking your Facebook page makes you appear online in Messenger.
What do you think of the Messenger Facebook integration? Is it working well for you? Do you like it? Let us know in the comments.