Facebook and messaging are entwined so well, that some people actually see chat as one of the best reasons to have a Facebook account. It gives you access to all your old friends, new friends, and family all in one spot.
On the website, Facebook chat is ubiquitous. You're online automatically unless you specify that you don't want to be, and chatting just starts spontaneously whenever someone notices you are there. It's possible to hide your online status from certain people, but with the friends you want to chat to, you're able to fall in and out of conversation really easily.
On a smartphone, you also have the Facebook messenger app, with its fantastic chat heads. The chat app will always show you messages as soon as you receive them, starting with a circular chat head popping up above anything else you're looking at. This lets you get straight back to whatever you were doing relatively quickly. Now we can get the same neat feature on Chrome, despite the fact that Facebook haven't released official chat heads functionality for the web or desktop.
Get Faces.im [No Longer Available]
Faces.im can be found in the Chrome web store. Add the extension, give it permission to access Facebook and you're set.
When you next get a Facebook message from someone, Faces will pop up a little chat head. If you hover over the head, you'll see the most recent message in a text bubble, and can decide if you want to reply immediately or not. If you don't want to reply just yet, the bubble can sit unobtrusively off to the side of your screen while you finish whatever you're doing. If you want to remove the chat head, there is a tiny cross that shows up when you're hovering over the chat head which will get rid of it for you.
If you click on the chat head, you'll be taken to a pop-up window where you can reply. This window shows your Facebook message history and looks more like a regular chat client. This can be really helpful if you need to read your history, or if you quickly want to start chatting to someone else. Photos, files and Facebook stickers can all be added easily.
Chat heads stack neatly on the right-hand side of your screen, so even if you've got many conversations in progress, you'll be able to get on with your work until you're ready to chat.
Turning Off Chat Heads
Faces.im can be turned off from the reply pop-up window by using the toggle button at the top. You can get back into Faces.im from your toolbar later to re-activate it.
On Chat, Yet Not Distracted
Something really useful for productivity about this extension is that you can stay available for your Facebook contacts all the time, yet you are not staring at a list of who else is online. You can forget about Facebook completely and get on with your work. You'll only be disturbed when someone actually wants to chat, which is far less distracting than seeing a list and watching people come online.
Another perk of Faces.im is that you're not switching between tabs for chatting purposes, nor are you keeping a tab open just for Facebook. If you're anything like me, you forget you're chatting and close the tab anyway.
Share Your Favourite Facebook Messenger Tools
What do you think of Faces.im? What do you think is the best Facebook chat client for Chrome? Do you prefer multi-service tools like eBuddy? Do you use a desktop Facebook messenger client, like Skype? Or do you use something else? Tell us about it.
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